Strange Glue
by Scribbler
Summary: [BBTerraRaven from a different angle] The world ended, but life didn't. The Titans survived ... after a fashion. This is their story from the edge. [10: Terra deals with maternal feelings and Mechanic's advances, while Starfire drifts further away.]
1. Beginning

**Disclaimer – **Nothing here is mine, damn it. 

**A/N **– Argh! It's like the fic that wouldn't die! _Stabs fic_ Written for UnknownSource as a prize for winning the _Odd Couples Contest_. Sorry it took so long, babs.

**Influences - **

_Batman: A Death in the Family_ by Jim Starlin, Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo.

_Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Unseen: Door to Alternity _by Nancy Holder and Jeff Mariotte.

_In the Country of Last Things_ by Paul Auster.

_Everworld: Gateway to the Gods_ by K.A. Applegate.

_Fever Pitch_ by Nick Hornby.

Film: _Lost in Space_

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_Strange Glue_

© Scribbler, March 2005

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_It was strange glue that held us together, _

_While we both came apart at the seams. _– 'Strange Glue' by Catatonia.

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**1. Beginning**

* * *

There is no accounting for love: no objective reason why we fall for one person and not another. The right mood, the right moment, the right state of mind during that all-important first encounter – take one away and there's no telling the differences wrought in, or by the others. A slight hesitation can mean missing the gaze of someone across the room, and continuing with your life, unaware that your possible soulmate just passed through your fingers. Stopping to peel gum from your shoe on your way to work can mean getting a later bus, while The One For You got the 315 you originally meant to catch. Buying milk from the corner store instead of the supermarket could mean decades of contentment with the clerk who served you, even if you'd never been to that store before, and never went back again.

Everything is arbitrary. Nothing is defined or pre-ordained by some higher power: A x B C and C + Z an endlessly happy couple. There are no rules to love, no regulations by which all living creatures capable of loving have to abide. If there were, then there would be no heartache, no star-crossed lovers, and no such thing as unrequited affection.

Like life, love is not fair.

And like life, love is not predictable.

* * *

Once upon a time there was a young girl called Tara Markov. She was a very pretty girl, born to a loving mother and an absent father who sometimes sent her letters. He also set up a trust fund for her, making sure she and her mother were always well provided for, and kept in a manner that encouraged a kind heart and a lively temperament in a daughter. She met him only once in her short life, but he seemed thoughtful and gentle, with a beard that tickled and eyes as blue as cornflowers, just like hers. Really, he was just the sort of man one hopes to have for a father.

However, despite a relatively idyllic childhood, all was not well. A coup in her father's country deposed him, and after a time the money he provided dried up. Trust fund inaccessible until she was twenty-one, Tara and her mother upped and moved the night before her sixth birthday, setting sail for America and the promise of a life somewhat like that they'd left behind.

America was a nice enough country. Not as rugged as the land she'd grown up in, true, but Tara came to refer to it as home. She learned the language, went to school, and became thoroughly entrenched in the trials and tribulations of the life of a pre-teen, and then a teenager, as laid down by the US government and Teen Queen Magazine.

Often she would indulge in the national pastime of watching superheroes on TV, cheering them on from the couch and cutting out newspaper articles to stick in a scrapbook. She told her mother she was going to chronicle the history of Superman, and present it to him one day when he was old and couldn't remember things so clearly. She had visions of walking up to a podium, presenting a crammed folder to a frail old man in a wheelchair, and having his rheumy eyes light up when he saw all the diligently preserved memoirs of his glory days. Heroes sometimes dropped in on her neighbourhood doing super-heroic things, but her heart skipped faster only when the red cape appeared.

She cried for hours when they announced he was dead. Her school held a memorial service, and she went up to the microphone to recite a prayer in her native tongue that made the kids in the front row roll their eyes. It was supposed to signify that Superman had not been just an American icon, but a symbol of peace and justice to the whole world. All it really did was get her a fat lip after final bell.

The Justice League carried on, of course, but there was always a sense of incompletion about their battles after that; as if everyone were just waiting for the familiar red cape and skivvies to come flying in at the last second and pull a deus ex machina. When Green Lantern died and his replacement was some white dude in a mask, there wasn't even half the media circus there might have been. When that big jerk, Joto, tried to be a Leaguer and ripped off half the Watchtower's technology to sell at intergalactic auctions, gossip columns snitched and snickered. When Hawkgirl stepped onto a prototype teleportation pad and disappeared back to Thanagar, all she got was a passing nod from the Daily Planet and a mini-feature on CNN.

Crises came and went. Heroes died and retired and were replaced. The roster of the Justice League remained constant, insofar as there _was_ a League and there _was _a roster, but it was never quite the same.

Tara watched it all from the relative safety of her threadbare blue couch.

By her fifteenth year, the apocalypse had seemed to come and go so often that it was hardly a surprise for her to wake up one morning and find that the prefix 'post' could finally be applied to her world.

Aliens, people said. There was little information in circulation, especially when the major satellites were yanked down from space to cause craters in Arizona and the Pacific Ocean. Still, there was enough to find that out with minimal digging. Some people postulated it was all to do with the technology Joto sold off. There was an irony to the idea that nobody really appreciated.

Tara and her mother, plus as many other people as could make the trip, took whatever transport still worked and made their way towards Jump City, the nearest conurbation with a mostly-undamaged hospital and enough survivors to bury the dead. It was a mass migration that thinned out along the way.

Her mother died en route, spine crushed by a falling support beam. Tara stayed with the body long after the others had moved on, scrabbling out a shallow grave with her fingers and whatever tools came to hand. A broken plank of wood, a spoon, a plastic video cassette case – all of it was used and placed next to the mound of dirt afterwards, as a sort of tribute and marker, since there was no means for her to write any lasting pointer. She also put in the grave the body of a baby she'd found. Her mother loved babies, and Tara felt certain she would have rapped her knuckles if she'd thought her daughter would rather leave one at the side of the road than have her mother share her grave.

The baby's face was black and shrivelled with old death, its tiny body wasted. As Tara folded her mother's arms around it, the thought hit home to her: _This really is the end of the world_.

Later, when she developed incredible abilities to move earth and rocks with her mind, all she thought about was how useful it might have been then, when her skin was bleeding and her nails and cheeks were caked in filth and blood and tears.

She honed her abilities on the deformed creatures that preyed on survivors, learning how to kill without causing undue pain, and how to defend herself without really thinking about it. She developed fighting instinct – _survival_ instinct. Her path to Jump was littered with stories of a girl who could find and call water from underground tributaries, who made the ground part before her, and who looked out for those who could not.

The stories talked her up a bit more than was comfortable, describing her like some untamed Valkyrie when she just dealt with trouble whenever she happened on it. And it didn't even have to be unlawful trouble, either, just stuff that didn't live up to her personal ethical code. Stealing from corpses – icky, but needs musts wants. Stealing from children, and you'd find yourself with a face-full of angry geokinetic. Kill or rape or… well, then you got yourself a whole mess of flying rocks and stuff. She tended to cause far more damage than she found, but in the newly broken landscape it was difficult to tell.

When she finally reached the city, she discovered a welcome wagon in the form of two-dozen waiting Misshapens, all eager for her blood. They may have known about the stories, but she'd never heard one speak, never seen enough to think they understood words anymore.

Misshapens were creatures that were not quite human, but which might once have been ordinary men and women. It was sometimes possible to see a spark of what they used to be; maybe in their death throes, or in the sibilant noises they used to call children into the dark. Yet most of their humanity had been sucked out of them, leaving behind only animal instincts and raw bloodlust. They ate flesh wherever they could find it, sometimes hunting, sometimes scavenging, and sometimes even digging up corpses. Atrophied fingers sharpened into claws made formidable weapons, as did fangs and horns and all manner of other appendages.

Tara wondered if they had once been like her, possessed of some special, inexplicable ability, until the aliens got their… well, pick a synonym for hands that suited them. Until they got their dexterous-prehensile-digits on the planet and poured chemicals into it that twisted them into monsters.

She was good. She was very good. But against two-dozen Misshapens, she was not good enough. That was when she learned that it was all well and good to be a saviour and a hero, but when you're in trouble you're pretty much on your own unless other people are willing to step in. A hero is a lonely guise.

That was how she met the Titans. Not the most splendid of introductions – dusty and torn and covered in blood. Some of it was hers, too, because it had been a nasty fight. There were clumps of blonde hair and tiny bits of scalp all over the place, but there were more patches of leathery skin and scales. Tara had never learned any formal fighting, but she'd had to defend herself against playground bullies and their ilk. When coupled with her jagged geokinesis, and those things she'd learned on the road, it made for an unorthodox but effective technique.

The first she knew of their presence was when a bolt of green energy scarred the earth in front of her, and a mound of dark telekinesis plucked a Misshapen off her back. The too-loud boom of a sonic blaster heralded several new bodies into the fray, and then she was back-to-back with someone who kicked and punched and strafed the oncoming creatures with exploding projectiles. She thought she could see a cougar snapping at the Misshapens' heels as they fled, but by that point she was sinking to the floor from a combination of fatigue and blood loss.

One of her rescuers picked her up and carried her in strong arms, though she fancied she could also feel the cool press of metal against her skin – especially the parts where she hadn't been fast enough to avoid acid saliva from the Misshapen with the frill. The burn was hot and kind of sticky. Something was running down her leg and into her shoe.

They didn't take her to a survivor compound, as she'd expected, but to an out-of-the-way place – a cave, of sorts. She didn't see the way in, since she was unconscious. She woke up to find someone gripping the ankle she'd fractured, and a husky alto telling her not to rush getting to her feet in the next ten minutes because it still needed time to heal. She tried to ignore it, of course, and found herself telekinetically plonked on her butt.

They introduced themselves one by one: Robin, Cyborg, Starfire, Raven and Beast Boy. Robin held sway over the conversation, obviously their leader, and grilled Tara on her powers and where she'd come from. She left out nothing. There was no point in protecting her father's reputation anymore.

She couldn't explain the geokinesis, though, and so Robin ordered for the one called Raven to 'scan' her, which was an interesting experience. Tara underwent it because she'd heard of the Titans before everything went bad. She trusted them. It was an implicit thing – Superman once went on the news commending the Titans for their work and integrity. She could do no less.

Raven pronounced her geokinesis a mutation, most likely caused by the low-level energy emissions from the alien strongholds. So far they knew of only a few – one in the Gobi Desert, one in the Sahara, and one in Arizona. Trends said that these same emissions had ravished crops and some water supplies, as well as all manner of other things humans needed to survive. Tara asked if they were planning to take down these strongholds, which incurred a sardonic eyebrow from Robin.

"We'd like to, but we're strictly small-time. The Justice League are the big-hitters. If they want us as back up, then they'll find a way to contact us. We can't risk a half-cocked frontal assault. It's the best way to get ourselves killed. And if we go jetting off to fight someplace else, what happens to all the survivors who're coming here? The Misshapens would have them for breakfast before we'd even gone half a mile."

Tara had looked at them, at these people who really weren't that much older than her, and yet had taken it upon themselves to play hero for this city's rapidly expanding population. Then she had swung her leg over the side of the cot, stood shakily, and said, "Let me fight with you."

Robin had raised his eyebrow again. "We don't have time to train a newbies."

"You don't have many allies to help you, either. I'm a resource. Use me."

And so they had.

They didn't take much convincing. Perhaps there was something she could have read into that.

It took a while for them to fully trust her, of course, but she integrated herself admirably. She watched them, learned from them, and sometimes they would break their word and help train her. There was an undercurrent of suspicion at first, but it was obvious they'd always meant to recruit her. Otherwise, why would they have taken her to their cave instead of a compound?

A codename was like a rite of passage. It emphasised her membership of their team. They called her Metahuman for a while, but she hated it, so she switched to Tectonic. It still wasn't working, though. Eventually Starfire redubbed her 'Terra' when she had to explain what 'terra firma' meant. It sounded a little like her given name, making it more personal than any other moniker. Nobody objected, so it stuck.

Terra and the Teen Titans. It was like slipping on a rubber glove and having it mould to the contours of her hand. Familiar, safe and somehow, weirdly, perfectly normal in the abnormally smashed world they'd come to live in.

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_To Be Continued…_

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**IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR, GO THE EXTRA MILE BY LEAVING ME A REVIEW!**


	2. Not Quite a Star Trek Debate

**A/N **- Just as a side note, if anyone objects to the minor jumps in time throughout the rest of the fic, I'll say now that they're there because this entire thing was originally written as one long narrative, but eventually grew too big to digest that way, so I chopped it up into chapters. Just so y'all know.

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**2. Not Quite a Star Trek Debate**

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The word wasn't 'whoomph'. The _experience_ was 'whoomph'.

Terra stumbled backwards, resisting the pull of the small, multicoloured hole in the air. Staring at it was like staring at a Picasso in a blender, with added Essence of Hurricane dragging her towards it. She could feel her feet making grooves in the soft ground where the concrete had all been torn up by battle.

The carcass of the Misshapen she'd been fighting lifted off the ground and flew towards the hole with the speed of a bowling ball dropped from a great height. The hole was about ten inches in diameter, if that, and ragged around the edges. Impossibly, the body folded in on itself, compacting and twisting into a shape with a diameter much smaller than ten inches. It disappeared through without so much as a crunch, and nothing whatsoever like the implosion of air that had announced the appearance of the phenomenon.

Terra thought of black holes. Except this one was not black, and she was not in the depths of space. She was on the banks of Jump River, having destroyed a nest of Misshapens under the bridge. She was also trying very hard to understand how this could be happening, while at the same time using her geokinesis to not follow the carcass.

A barricade of earth sprang up around her, made uneven by instinct. It took only two minutes for it to be sucked into the colourful void.

Terra might have cried out, except she was rather certain her voice would vanish in there as well. So when the lasso of dark energy wrapped around her midriff, she made no sound, and was equally silent when it yanked her away into a portal.

Raven was on the other side, along with Cyborg and Beast Boy. Raven's hands were encased with the same energy that held Terra, but it quickly evaporated. Terra found herself dumped unceremoniously on the floor. They were in a clapped out old building that used to hold patent attorney offices until the roof caved in. What it lacked in ceiling it made up for in wall-to-wall carpeting. Plush carpeting, which meant her landing was softer than usual.

She gripped her stomach and waited for it to settle down. "I hate teleporting."

"Well if you hadn't gone off alone like that, I wouldn't have had to pluck you from the drooling jaws of death, would I?" Raven said in a tone as wet as a desert.

Cyborg was more sympathetic, as he and Beast Boy helped Terra up. "Why'd you try to fly solo, girl? Raven had to cast a psychic net just to find you, and you _know_ how great that makes her feel."

"Sorry, Ray." Terra coughed and gingerly felt her ribs. "Found a nest. I think it was the one that's been targeting Sector Twelve recently."

Beast Boy screwed up his face. "Um, I forget. Is Sector Twelve the one that stops at Matheson Avenue, or Maple Grove?"

Cyborg shook his head. "Neither. Wychberry Street."

"Aw, man. I hate these dumb sectors. Can't we just say 'to hell' with Robin's system and go by names again?"

Cyborg rolled his good eye. Raven blanked everyone, assuming a lotus position on a busted reception desk. Terra wanted to smile, because Beast Boy had this way of making you _want_ to smile all the time, but her chest honestly hurt too much to get beyond a grimace.

"You get 'em?" Cyborg asked her, breaking the moment.

She nodded. "Wiped them out. And almost got wiped out myself by that … thing. What the hell _was _that, anyway?"

"A chaos vent."

"A who's-in-the-what-now?"

Raven fixed her with a bleak stare. It wasn't much of a stretch from her usual expression, but it still made frost crawl up Terra's spine. While she wasn't exactly an expert on all the Titans, she knew next to nothing about Raven. The others trusted her with their lives, which, by default and her status as newbie, meant she had to as well, but there was still something about Raven that gave her the willies. She was too intense, too severe, too … cold. And creepy. Yes, she definitely looked like 'creepy' had been coined for her personal use. Everything about her seemed geared towards shutting out the rest of the world. Why she was putting herself out saving it was anybody's guess.

"A chaos vent," Raven said slowly, in the same voice teachers reserved for especially dense children. "A temporary, non-linear singularity similar to a temporal anomaly."

Terra waved away the hands trying to help her. "I think I speak for everyone when I say huh?"

"They're like mini black holes," said Cyborg.

"Yeah. Okay, understood that. But aren't black holes a 'space, the final frontier' deal? What the heck are they doing here? And shouldn't we be more worried about that one by the river inhaling all existence?"

"Negative. Like Raven said, they're temporary. And they're only _like_ black holes, in that they have this nasty habit of, uh, inhaling anything around them that ain't tied down. They don't suck up light, though, so they ain't as bad as the real deal. But what goes in, it don't come out again, and we don't have much clue where any of it goes. We really don't know all that much about 'em. They started popping up right after … y'know."

In true Harry Potter tradition, people had started refusing to mention the day civilisation ended by name. Cyborg was no exception. Terra really couldn't see much point to it. What was _was_, and choosing not to say it out loud wouldn't change that. But then, she couldn't see much point to many things. Like why they didn't go hook up with wherever the Justice League was and try to take back their world in a more-than-piecemeal fashion. Or why nobody had ever _seen_ one of the infamous aliens.

"They usually disappear again after a few minutes," Cyborg went on, "taking with 'em whatever they're able to suck up."

"Kinda like a giant vacuum cleaner," Beast Boy added, and mimed hoovering the debris around them.

Terra blinked. "You're taking these things remarkably well. Aren't you even curious as to what they are, where they came from?"

Beast Boy stopped. "What do you think Robin's doing when he locks himself away for hours?"

"He said he thinks they might be portals, like Raven's," Cyborg said. "But without going into one it's all guesswork. And you can imagine how eager people are to go jumping into oblivion in the name of science."

"I see. And the reason I wasn't notified about these 'chaos vents' before is…?"

He rubbed at the back of his neck. "We haven't had a flare-up since before you got here. Which makes it about three-ish months. We were kinda hoping they'd stopped of their own accord." He looked through the shattered revolving glass doors. "We got enough to stress over without stuff like this."

Terra felt something pinch in the pit of her stomach. "Yeah, well, looks like you were wrong. They're very much still around."

"Not that one." Raven opened her eyes. A thin curl of obsidian wafted away from her face. It was an incredibly eerie sight. "It just vanished."

"What do you mean, van -" Terra straightened and winced. A low hiss worked its way between her clenched lips.

Cyborg was instantly all business, scientific theory forgotten in the face of medical fact. "Let me see." He moved towards her with palms open, body-speak for 'no arguments, please'.

Terra backed off a step. "I don't need to be taped up," she started, until her back pressed against something solid overlaid with something soft and ticklish. A pair of huge paws encircled her shoulders. "Aw, man. Beast Boy, you really gotta do that to a girl?"

The lime green panda gave a very un-panda-like grin.

* * *

Terra launched herself at the Misshapen, throwing a front snap kick to the chest. She could hear the air whoosh out as it fell backward. Good. No breath for warning signals, or screaming. She hated it when they screamed.

She landed with both knees on top of it. Robin's not-really-training was paying off. A rib cracked – not one of hers. She refused to take pleasure in the sound, instead pooling yellow power in her hands and letting it drip through her fingers.

The Misshapen thrashed wildly. Terra hung on. The bank vault she'd tracked it to was great for sheltering in, but thick enough that it took some exertion to get earth through it. Those who'd supervised its construction _really _wanted their moolah to be safe. She located some nearby rocks and dragged them towards her, throwing them against the other side of the vault's walls with as much force as the soil density would allow.

The Misshapen's eyes flashed. You didn't have to be completely human to be afraid. She thought she could almost smell the fear oozing off it. It was bitter, and tasted bad on the very back of her tongue. For a second she thought she was going to throw up. Yet she couldn't look away. You looked away, you let your guard down. You let your guard down, you were dead inside three seconds – four, tops. So she had to stare at it, looking for signs it was going to get loose, until the walls gave way and soil poured into the room. Only then did she step off, and even then she still had to use her geokinesis to make sure the soil covered it, and feel for when it stopped twitching.

When she was certain it was dead, she set about shoving soil back through the gap, making sure to take the body with it. She didn't want to look at the rictus its face had become. Her sixth sense, the one that tapped into her geokinesis, had already formed a picture in her mind of each petrified contour, line and curve. She didn't need it corroborated by her eyes.

Then she concentrated hard, utilising a new trick she and Beast Boy had been working on. She felt the molecules in the soil speed up, felt them fuse together, and then let them cool into a plug of no less than three feet of solid rock.

Fatigue made her muscles shake. She didn't realise until she came back to herself and grasped that her outstretched arms hurt and her legs were threatening to give out. She leaned against a part of the metal that wasn't too hot, scrubbing at her eyes, and then looked at the three faces in the corner. Each one was etched in nothing less than pure horror.

"It's okay now," she said in what was meant to be a soothing voice. It didn't help that the dust had made her throat all scratchy. "It's gone. It won't hurt you anymore. You're safe."

The man swallowed loudly. He was dressed in a hopelessly incongruous blue wool suit, and had prematurely grey hair curling into his eyes. "From what?" he asked. "Them, or you?"

The woman held her son close and gaped at Terra's handiwork. "What've you done? You ruined our shelter. You _ruined_ it. How could you? How could you _do _that to us?"

Terra regarded them for only a second. The kid said nothing, but met her gaze with something like curiosity. He didn't make any move away from his mother's arms, though. Terra raised a hand, paused, and then let it drop back to her side. She stumbled back to the surface through the network of corridors without another word.

* * *

Beast Boy advanced on her with a towel in his hands. It was threadbare and greyish, and looked altogether too unsanitary for medicinal purposes.

Terra scooted backwards and immediately regretted it when fire blossomed in her chest. "Keep that thing away from me. It's a health hazard!"

He stopped, looked down at it, and then back up at her. "I'll keep it away if you tell me where you hurt."

"Fat chance – hey! Leave off. It's probably infested with Bubonic Plague, or something!" She made shoving motions with her hands that turned to pulling at the tattered sleeves of her shirt. They'd never gotten around to uniforms or anything, so she'd scraped by on whatever clothing they could scrounge. Right now it was too-big shorts and a non-gore-covered tee-shirt of indeterminate colour. Heat-retention was no longer an issue – the city was baking hot all day and all night. "My back teeth feel weird, my ribs are turning a nice shade of purple, and I think I might have broken my pinkie, but I'm _fine_, okay?"

He made a snorting noise. "Yeah. You really sound it. C'mere."

"No."

"Just let me take a look - "

"Leave _off_." The walls around them began to tremble.

Beast Boy froze. Being underground when an earthquake hits is never a good thing, and he looked to Terra with questioning eyes.

She ran a hand through her hair. It got stuck in knots on the crown of her skull. "Yeah, that was me. Sorry. Lost my concentration for a second. But I really am fine. Really. I can last 'til Ray gets back."

"Yeah. Right. Don't let her hear you calling her that, or she'll hang you out to dry."

"What – Ray? It's not that bad a nickname, is it?"

"Better than Booger Breath – which I really don't appreciate, by the way." Beast Boy made an attempt to look imposing, but failed miserably. "Green's a very handsome colour."

"Yu-huh."

He sighed. "Terra, I'm sure you _could_ wait until Raven gets back, but since I have no idea when that'll be, and I don't want you passing out all over the floor, you're gonna sit down and let me take a look at fixing you up. All right?"

"You're gonna go great white shark on my ass unless I do, aren't you?"

"Nu-uh. Gorilla. Or maybe velociraptor. Or even - "

"Okay, okay, I get the picture." She shifted back on the cot, pressing the heels of her hands into the mattress. Her palms were chapped and a little raw. She really had to look into getting some gloves. "But I swear, you go anyplace but my ribs and I'm _so_ gonna nail your ass to the wall."

"Why Terra, I had no idea you even thought about my ass." He grinned wickedly.

"Dream on, lover boy."

"But you gotta admit, it is a nice tush." He wiggled it, peering over his shoulder and straining to look down. Then he turned back to the cot. "Uh, you're gonna have to lay down - "

"I said dream _on_."

"Terra, seriously," his voice lost a little of its colour, "work with me here. Lay down so I can get a better look. I'll be good. Scout's honour." As if to emphasise, he saluted.

"You were a Boy Scout?" she asked, as she leaned back on her elbows.

"Lie down properly, please. And no, not really. Too rigidly organised."

She snorted. "And yet, here you are, part of a superteam with perhaps the most anally-retentive person in the world for its leader."

Beast Boy shrugged. "Robin's not so bad. It could be worse. We could have Batman as leader."

"Oh, woe betide us. Hey, watch it," she warned, as he lifted her tee-shirt to just beneath her bra.

"Sorry."

He poked experimentally at her left side, which was closest, and was rewarded with a sharp hiss. The lower half of her ribcage there felt wrong, she knew – like slightly overripe fruit. She could have told him that, but she was never one to flag up her hurts. She'd always been fiercely independent in her own way, and since joining this band of merry misfits made her, by definition, reliant on others, her independence had sought other outlets. Which included bull-headedness and bloody-mindedness.

"You're good, but you're gonna have to be taped up until Raven gets back. The minor cuts I can dress, easy, but I think I may have to splint that finger."

"Oh, lucky, lucky me." Terra sat up and tugged her top down.

She watched as Beast Boy sifted through the rapidly diminishing medical supplies in the corner. From what she understood, Titans Tower, symbol of all things Teen and Titan, had been gassed and then bombed before everything went to hell in a hand-basket. Luckily, the Titans hadn't been in it at the time, but they'd lost most of their equipment and data files, as well as almost all means of radio communication – much good it would have done them anyway after so many satellites fell. It had taken months for Robin and Cyborg to cobble together something approaching a base of operations in this cave, while Starfire applied herself to making it feel less like a refuge and more like a home.

Provisions still ran short, though, generally centring on what they could find and scavenge. Beast Boy was very strict about his vegetarianism, and so refused to accompany anyone when they went out trapping in what little remained of the forest. Some survivors talked about eating Misshapen meat, but the very thought of it made Terra feel sick. Needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle, but still…

"What was it like?" she asked suddenly.

Beast Boy looked up, a roll of bandages in his hand. "Hm? What was what like?"

"Fighting before all … this?" She waved a noncommittal hand, ensnaring everything around and beyond them into the gesture. "Being a superhero when it actually meant something."

"It still means something," he said carefully.

"Pfft. Yeah. It's a real big deal, scrapping for food and finding bodies to bury. And even if we do save people, what good is it in the long run? What good's it do them? What good's it do _us_?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Look around you, Beast Boy. What's left to fight for? I mean, are we really doing these people any favours by saving them? What kind of life can they lead in a place like this? Or any other place since that-thing-we-don't-mention."

He stared at the bandages, turning them over and passing them from hand to hand. He'd lost one of his gloves somewhere, and two fingers on the other were missing. "I don't think I like where this conversation is going."

"Why? Because it doesn't follow the superhero code of honour? Because it's more realistic than what we've been allowed to talk about lately? Listen, I didn't sign up to play 911-substitute. Sure, I want to save lives, but I _don't _like the idea of being just a short-term solution while the long-term stuff goes untended. I thought the Titans were all about the big picture – y'know, saving the _planet_, not just one crummy little berg that's as good as dead anyway."

"And the people on that crummy berg?" There was silence for a moment. When he spoke again, Beast Boy's voice was soft, his eyes downcast. "You haven't been with us very long, Terra. You don't know how things were before."

"I saw how the Justice League used to handle stuff. And Supergirl. And Green Arrow. And half a dozen other heroes. And I don't have to know what the glory days were like from the inside to know that there's some serious lack of planning going on here. 411? If somebody doesn't do something about the aliens and their strongholds, the Earth isn't going to get better. And even if it doesn't get worse, things are _screwed_ as they are. Misshapens, diseases, chaos vents, in-fighting among survivors." Terra paused. She took a long breath and looked at her toes, rotating her feet at the ankles. "Today I had to bury three kids. Not one of them was over six years old, all healthy apart from the fact that they were, y'know dead. They were killed because they found a stash of canned foods in some wreckage, and someone bigger than them didn't want to share. Beast Boy, a world where I find that three times a day is completely FUBAR, and I … I start to think that maybe we're just prolonging the inevitable by going down this small-time route. Times have changed. The world's changed. The old Titans M.O. just isn't going to cut it anymore."

"You really feel that strongly?"

"I've buried … I've buried too many people recently." She lifted her gaze. "Don't get me wrong. Saving lives is a great thing to do. And it's pretty much the only thing keeping me from going insane right now. It's just … I don't want to save some kid from a Misshapen just to find him dead five minutes later by a human hand. That's not the way I want things to be."

Beast Boy snorted. "You think this is any easier for the rest of us? Geez, Terra, do you really believe we want things to be like this any more than you do?"

"Did I say that? No. I just want to know _why_ we aren't getting our world back for these people to live in. If the aliens did so much damage, maybe some of their technology can turn it around again. Make the chaos vents go away, or turn the Misshapens back into … get rid of the Misshapens.

"And if it can't? If a thousand people die in Jump City while we're away finding out that it can't, what then?"

"At least we'd have _tried_." Her voice rose. Terra prided herself on keeping situations light, on not making like this could be the last few seconds any of them had. But this … she'd had an especially rough day, her body was a mess of bruises and contusions, and she'd really just had enough of pussyfooting around what was bothering her. "That's better than saying 'woe is us' when everything goes down the crapper anyway."

"We don't know that'll happen. The Justice League - "

"Could be dead, for all we know. We could be the only superheroes left, and we're sitting on our hands because we might make the wrong decision. _Might._ I'm sick of holding dead babies in my arms. I want to make a difference."

"You are. _We _are. To these people."

"But our planet is _dying_, Beast Boy." Her voice hit a note to shatter glass. "How can we compensate not trying to save _it_ by saving only a few lives each day?"

Beast Boy opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He spent a few seconds running his bare hand over the bandages, then turned away and busied himself with something she couldn't see. "You should talk to Robin about this, not me. He's in charge."

Terra waited a moment before hopping delicately off the cot and crossing the space between them. She laid a hand on his shoulder, felt him tense up and stay tensed up at the contact. Beast Boy had been her ally since she arrived, defending her when she messed up, teaching her as much as he could about being a superhero, taking a vested interest in manipulating her powers outside 'don't crush yourself or other people by accident'. They'd stayed up nights when they couldn't sleep. Everyone had nightmares – it was a given – but they _talked _about theirs, and it took the sting out. He'd told her about the TV commercials he starred in as a little kid, freshly greened and raring to show off his powers. She confided about burying her mother and the shrivelled baby, about how she'd cried when Superman died and the poem she read at his tribute. She'd taught him how to cuss in her native tongue, and he'd told her about past Titan exploits and adventures.

Yet now she felt like she barely knew him at all. His back was blank, his shoulders hunched, and she wanted nothing more than to have him corroborate what she'd said so they could get back to normal – or as normal as they could – and deal with any repercussions of it later.

"Beast Boy…" She couldn't say she was sorry, because she wasn't. She'd meant every word. Still, the apology dangling from the tip of her tongue.

"I won't say it hasn't crossed my mind," he said softly. "Bailing on Jump and finding what's left of other heroes … taking on the aliens … getting our planet back … But I won't be the one to explain to those people out there why I wasn't here to stop their mother, their sister, their friend from being killed or worse, because I saw the 'big picture' and they weren't a big enough part of it to get my attention." He pulled away, out of her grasp. "I'm sorry, Terra."

Terra said nothing.

A long moment passed. When she reached out and laid her left hand on his left shoulder again, he didn't shrug her off. Neither did he flinch at her right hand, nor when she leaned her brow against the back of his skull. The tips of his ears twitched, but that was all.

"Fifteen years old and debating the needs of the many against the needs of the few," she said with humourless chuckle. "And not even in a Star Trek conversation. Man, we are so fucked up."

Beast Boy just went about splinting her finger and taping up her ribs.

* * *

"Fall back!" Robin yelled. His voice was hoarse, and he wore a necklace of bruises courtesy of a Misshapen Starfire had obligingly turned into a plate of month-old Jell-O.

Terra sent up a flurry of sharp pebbles, trying to knock a creature with thick, leathery wings out of the air. Damn it, they could fly now? She had no time to reply to the order, but Cyborg voiced her thoughts.

"Not everyone's through yet - "

"We're getting pulverized!" Robin shouted back. "There's too many to handle this way. Fall _back_!" His right arm hung slack and bloody, and Terra noticed for the first time that he was ambidextrous. Either that, or he'd done extensive left hand training with that staff. Neither idea surprised her.

Cyborg had an unconscious Beast Boy slung over one shoulder, so he knew better than anyone that they had t back off. Raven was jabbing fists and flashes of dark energy at the horde of Misshapens, but for every one she took down there were at least two to take its place. Terra had never seen so many fangs and claws and feral eyes at once. The floor was slick with drool and blood of all colours.

The flying creature shrieked, one of its wings ragged from Terra's missiles. It plummeted into the writhing horde, where it screamed loud and long as it was torn apart. Misshapens had no compunction about eating their injured.

_Where did they all _**come**_from?_ Terra thought. No way had there been this many in Jump before. The Titans had dedicated endless hours to finding and systematically destroying Misshapen nests and hunting packs. There was a possibility they'd migrated here because of the relatively easy – or at least stationary – prey, but surely they would have noticed this many getting in? _Surely_ they would have had some inkling of the sheer _number _…

Then there was the possibility that these things used to be the people who were already in Jump. Robin and Cyborg had said on several different occasions that they'd found half-Misshapen, half-human carcasses after raids. Terra's stomach heaved at the idea, as well as the notion that it could have happened right under their noses. Only the complete lack of evidence for _this_ many transformations kept her from fully believing it was true.

Four creatures bearing only the most tenuous resemblance to anything human, or even mammalian, knelt over a fat human corpse in the corner of the city hall lobby. Its midsection was split open like a Christmas turkey, and the four were fighting over what they pulled out, shoving viscera into mouths that hinged open like alligators'. They were sheltered behind an upturned desk – the only reason the other Misshapens weren't getting in on the action. Instead, the rest were all trying to get past the Titans, to the cluster of people stumbling onto the street.

The fat corpse twitched.

"No!" Terra called up a mound of earth and used it to propel herself at them. "**_No_**!"

"Terra!" Robin's tone was interchangeable as either concerned or angry.

Terra ignored him. The sight of the four Misshapens and their not-quite-dead-yet meal had struck something deep within her, and she was no more in control of her actions than when she breathed. She knew her eyes were luminous. Her rage was boundless now. These things would pay.

One of the creatures noticed her. It dropped a length of intestine to wave its hands and make frenzied clacking noises. The other three looked up, drawing away from the body into defensive postures. Long, transparent wings unfolded on their backs, beginning to flutter and buzz. By the time Terra reached them, the first was already in flight.

She launched herself at its spindly legs, using her weight to bring it down. Her left foot grazed the body. The head fell to the side, blank eyes staring at her through ginger hair that was visibly greasy beneath the sweat. Its beard was stained with blood. If it had been alive when it twitched, it wasn't now. Terra jerked her foot away in revulsion.

The Misshapen she'd grabbed scratched at her with too-long fingers. She called up a spike of dirt from beneath the marble floor, compacted it into an inflexible mass, and impaled the creature. Large fragments of marble flew everywhere, but she was much too concerned with the trilling screech to notice. It sounded like a small child with a grazed knee wailing for Mommy to come kiss it all better.

The dying Misshapen fell on top of her, pinning her. It bled green. Terra spent a few haphazard moments wriggling free and wiping blood from her eyes. In those moments, the other three moved in on her amidst a host of furious clacking. She punched and thrust as much soil at them as she could concentrate on. The mounds were warped and smaller than usual, testament to her divided attention. Even so, one Misshapen went down with a squeal, a wing torn off and mashed. Another evaded the attack and bit down hard on Terra's shoulder, shattering her collarbone. She screamed in pain.

And then there was a squelchy sort of noise, not unlike a side of beef falling off its hook. Terra felt the pressure on her shoulder give a little, realising seconds later that this was because the muscles in her attacker's neck had been severed. The point where the neck ended was scant inches from her face. The Misshapen's head glared balefully at her, forever fixed in a snarl. Then it, too, was gone, and she was being picked up and deposited on her feet.

Pain sharpening her senses, Terra saw the remaining Misshapens charging towards her. In the same heartbeat, she used the spilled earth to catapult all the broken marble at them. What the white chunks didn't rip through, the earth pelted and buried along with their shrieks.

Cyborg's sonic blaster pitched three hairy Misshapens against the far wall. A couple of Robin's explosives collapsed it on top of them.

Starfire soared past, a thrashing something in her grasp. She thrust it headfirst through the ceiling, where it shuddered twice and hung limp. She left it there, nothing like satisfaction on her face.

Terra caught the expression and impulsively yelled, "Way to go, Starfire!"

Starfire looked down, nodded, and flew down to pluck another particularly dangerous-looking Misshapen from the dwindling crowd. She didn't smile, didn't scowl, didn't so much as _resemble _the warlike people Beast Boy had described Tamaraneans as being. Instead, she looked impossibly sad, as if taking the lives of these horrendous beasts was as much a travesty as the humans lives _they _had taken.

The battle passed quickly after that. Terra couldn't remember a lot of it, but she did recall standing over a fallen Misshapen, breathing hard and ready to take down the next, only to realise that there _were _no others. The horde had been wiped out. The threat, for the time being, was over.

Adrenaline leeched from her system as she reconvened with the other Titans. Without saying so, all of them trailed outside into the fresh air and midday sunshine. Her clothes stank of gore. Her knees trembled. She braced one hand against a wall that was sticky, not looking to see what with.

Robin was waiting to rip her a new one. "I said fall back," he snapped, wincing as Starfire inspected his damaged arm. "I gave an order. Yet you deliberately deserted your position and defied that order. You could have got us all _killed_ pulling a stunt like that."

"Got the job done, didn't I?" Terra replied sulkily, since she could give no good reason for her defiance that wouldn't come out like a toddler stamping its foot.

"That's not the point. I – ow!"

Starfire's hands were at right angles from her body. "Apologies, Robin. I believe I have located the source of your discomfort. A point in your upper musculature has been disengaged from the calcium-enriched substance you call bone."

Robin gritted his teeth. His mouth was a thin line. "Terra, you've been with us long enough to know that I don't give orders because I feel like it. I do it to keep us successful. And alive. You nearly got yourself killed back there - "

"Near misses don't count." Terra's head felt thick and woolly. She wondered whether it was all the blood she could smell, or just plain exhaustion. Probably the latter. The smell of blood was a common occurrence these days. She'd only slept three hours out of the last thirty-eight, and spent what felt like the rest fighting.

Robin looked like he was about to say more, but Cyborg came up. Beast Boy was rubbing his head and too woozy to be put down.

"Ugh – what'd I miss?"

"I believe it is better unsaid." Starfire patted his arm and eased him to his feet. "We were … victorious. It is enough."

Robin opened his mouth. Starfire shot him an eloquent look, and he closed it again. For all her brutality in battle, she never resorted to violence around the other Titans. She didn't need to. Sometimes it was incongruous how gentle and kind she was, given the world they lived in, and it was this mildness that made her such a formidable force. She exuded an aura of wounded nobility that made each of them want to abide by her wishes as far as they could – nobody more so than Robin.

Cyborg had gone back into the building. It was too full to be cleaned out, and the smell of carnage would surely have more Misshapens sniffing around. Terra didn't like to hope this battle had wiped them all out. Most likely the place would have to be burned, which meant fetching anything useful out of it first.

She rubbed at her forehead with the back of her hand. Those civilians they'd managed to evacuate were milling around, unsure what to do. Anything of value to them was inside. She glanced at them, wondering if Robin was going to take point and tell them where to go now.

A living shadow funnelled up beside her. Terra jerked away, tripping on a rock and shaking her already sore bones. A pair of unnaturally white eyes coalesced from the darkness, fixing her with a withering look.

"No more inside," Raven said when her mouth appeared. "None living, anyway," she added.

"Civilian casualties?" asked Robin.

"Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Maybe more." Raven shrugged. The gesture was so callous, so unfeeling, that it made Terra want to slap her.

Robin bowed his head. "Damn." He didn't curse as much as some, so the minor invective carried more weight than if Terra or Cyborg had said it.

Raven crooked her finger. "Let me see that arm." She moved so elegantly that it was hard to believe she didn't just float above the ground instead of walking on it. Maybe she did. That cloak answered for a lot.

Terra turned to Beast Boy, intending to ask if he was okay, but Raven's voice looped around her larynx first.

"You're welcome," she said, and then she was at Robin's side, telling him the tricep had been partially gouged out and it was a miracle he wasn't in full-out shock, let alone still standing. She didn't look at Terra, didn't give her any acknowledgement, and Terra spent a few seconds waiting for the attention that didn't come.

"Hey, Beast Boy."

He looked up. The tip of one ear was missing. "Hm?"

"I think I understand why we're looking at the small picture, now."

"Yo, Robin!" Cyborg bounded down the steps of City Hall and made a beeline for the group.

"Cyborg. Problems?" Robin's face was lit by the eerie glow of Raven's healing energies. She didn't bother looking up, but Starfire's brows pulled together.

"Friend Cyborg, have you discovered something of significance?"

"Y'all might say that."

"Cy, talk straight, man," said Beast Boy. "My head won't stand a game of Twenty Questions. What've you found?"

Cyborg sighed. His voice lowered to a volume only they could hear. "I … I found what's left of Mammoth."

* * *

**To Be Continued...**

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* * *

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And now we have some **REVIEW REPLIES!**

Hey, **Lyranfan**, how's it going? I was quite proud of that intro (I can't write intros, they wind up turning into prologues) so it was nice that you noticed it. And I was a Marvel Girl (no pun intended) before finding an old, ooold copy of _Teen Titans: Cyborg ... No More? _in a local thrift shop a couple of years ago. Now I'm equal parts into Marvel and DC. One has the streamlined, cohesiveuniverse, and one has the X-Men. Hee.

You have no idea how many tries it takes me to get your name right, **Psycho-Neuroticaly Disturbed**. My fingers are refusing to cooperate today. Terra's background here is an abbreviated/updated/mangled version of her backstory from the comics, less the craziness. She _was _the illegitimate daughter of a king, but they were never going to get that past the censors for the cartoon. And I _did_ update _Fortune's Fool_! See? There it is, right there.

Thanks, **Lunatrixy**.

Want to know a secret, **Jefepato**? I don't have much clue where I'm going with this, either. Well, I have an ending, and several key events I need to happen, but joining the dots is going to be a learning experience for both of us.

You're welcome, **UnknownSource**. But less of the throwing yourself at my feet, 'kay? It's really not _that _good, andIjust cleaned these shoes.

It's funny you should say that, **Water81**, as I used to be a hella lot more longwinded than I am now. Obviously I still need to work on it, but ... your comment gurgled up an ironic laugh anyway. I _do _have a beta who checks these things for me, but I'll ask her specifically about my paragraphing next time.


	3. Entrapment

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* * *

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**3: Entrapment**

* * *

Terra was getting better at closing doors inside her head.

She could stand, and breathe, and think of nothing. She could close her eyes and look at the blankness there, let it spread, and pretend that there was nothing else. She pretended there wasn't the ever-present low hum of pain around her, that she didn't wake up after each sleep, unrefreshed and not wanting to wonder why the hell she wasn't dead already. She pretended she was back home, on her threadbare blue couch with a bowl of Frosties and the TV remote. She pretended she was watching cartoons. She pretended life was one big cartoon, and everything would turn out okay by the time the end credits rolled. She pretended Superman was still alive. She pretended her belly was full, that the landscape was not caked in rubble, and her ears free from the peculiar hunting cries of the Misshapens.

But when she opened her eyes the doors reopened. It was all different on the outside.

Things would never be the same again, and no amount of pretending was going to change that.

* * *

She was retching over a sewer grate. There had been no battle, no heroic rescue. The old couple had smiled at her, climbed into their car, and stuck the cigarette lighter into the can of petrol they'd been carrying. The whole thing went up so fast she'd been blown backwards, hit her head on a rock, and not come to until 'fiery wreck' had become 'smouldering remains'.

Someone lifted her hair from her face. Soft fingers brushed her neck, tracing down to rub at one shoulder.

"We've really got to stop meeting like this," she said weakly.

Beast Boy gave a small smile that didn't reach his eyes. He didn't look at the car, but his nostrils flared at the acrid smell. It was like roast pork mixed with _eau de gas station_.

"I guess they thought it was best." Terra wiped at her mouth. Her arms felt shaky braced like this, but she didn't dare sit up in case the jolt to her stomach proved too much. It was ironic, in a not-really sort of way – all the terrible things she'd seen and done and smelled, and an old couple who didn't want to stick around anymore caused the biggest reaction.

"It doesn't get any easier," Beast Boy told her, forgoing small talk. "First time I saw it was back at the beginning. A knee-jerk reaction, Raven called it. A whole bunch of people decided it was best to do it themselves instead of waiting. Especially after… when they heard about Wonder Woman. Once, a group of five people put stones in their pockets and walked into the bay. They held hands. It was like some Girl Guides singalong thing." He sighed. "One of them got angry when I went giant squid and fished her out. We found her washed up on shore the next day."

"Oh, BB…" Terra couldn't think of anything to say.

"Raven seems to find them the most. You can always tell, because she comes back with this… this look on her face, and… you just know." He shrugged, like that would explain it. "I can't speak for everyone, but I can sort of understand the why, even if I don't like it." He didn't clarify whether he meant he didn't like that it happened, or that he didn't like finding the bodies afterward.

"Yeah." Terra reached around to her shoulder and laid a hand awkwardly on his. "Sort of."

* * *

"What are you doing in here?"

Terra jumped and whirled around, a mixture of alarm and guilt on her face. "Not touching anything! I wasn't touching anything at all."

Raven's eyes narrowed. She swept in on cat-feet, inspecting everything before turning to regard Terra with an imperious stare.

Of all the Titans, Raven had somehow managed to salvage the most stuff from their old home. Not that Terra could understand why she'd want half the things stacked in this, her portion of the caves. Three dusty old books with leather bindings sat in a pile next to a cracked hand-mirror. The cover of the top book had been almost completely burned off, and some of the pages were browned from exposure to fire. The other two had spines plastered in intricate looking sigils, some embossed in gold and silver, and all grimy from being handled by many hands. A black throw and a pair of small ceramic spheres completed the look, lending Raven's personal area a mysterious, half-eastern allure.

Terra toed the dirt. She was the very antithesis of this eastern grace: earthy, basic, and expressly ordinary. She felt like a sparrow sharing a cage with a macaw. "I just wanted to say thank you for the assist," she mumbled, the walls eating her words.

"Excuse me?"

"At City Hall. I never said thank you."

"And you felt the need to do so now."

"Well… yeah."

"Hm."

"Call it… call it a case of delayed gratitude. Which I wanted to put right. So… I am."

"And that's it?"

"I guess so."

"All right. Now leave."

Terra raised her eyes. "Huh?"

Raven wasn't looking at her, but at the hand mirror, which she had picked up and now held lightly in one hand. "I see no reason for you to stay when you've said your piece and I've heard it. That seems to cover all bases for gratitude, doesn't it? And I doubt the delayed variety is much different. You say, I hear, you get lost."

"Oh."

"What?" She folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. On anyone else it might have indicated curiosity – on Starfire it might even have looked endearing – but on Raven it seemed almost accusing. There was a serrated quality to her grace. "Did you expect me to shake your hand? Give you a 'you're welcome' hug, or sing you some tradition Tamaranean ode?"

"Not quite. But I was kind of hoping for… I dunno. Something."

"Very specific."

"Geez, Ray. Why do you have to make things so difficult?" It was a rhetorical question, but Raven answered anyway.

"I don't make them difficult. They already are."

"I don't mean like that," Terra said, a trifle petulantly. "I mean… why are you always to hostile to people? I thought the Titans were your friends."

"They are."

"So why don't you ever treat them like they are?"

"You say that after you came here to thank me for saving your life?"

"That's not what I - " Terra paused. She'd been tripped up. "Okay, so you got me there. But seriously, things are bad enough as it is. It's already doomy and gloomy enough out there. Robin's nearly out of him mind trying to predict the unpredictable and make sure we don't all end up smeared across the asphalt. Starfire's exhausting herself making sure _he_ doesn't exhaust himself. Cyborg's up in arms every time we go out, and Beast Boy… BB's like me – just trying to stay sane. Would it kill you to show a little warmth now and then, to lift people's spirits and junk?"

"Possibly."

"Excuse me, was that a joke?"

Raven closed her eyes for a second. Her lips moved around silent words, and when she reopened her eyes they showed nothing approaching kindliness or irritation. They were like the glass eyes of a doll – pretty, but thoroughly expressionless. "I don't make jokes," she said quietly. "I've been the punchline all my life."

Terra threw up her hands, made a comment about valiant efforts, and left on that note. She spent the rest of the evening pondering what Raven had meant and avoiding the pseudo-Eastern part of the caves.

* * *

Apart from conversation with whoever was willing, Terra's main distraction between outings was a battered notebook she'd found in an abandoned stationary store. It wasn't a flashy thing, but the pastel cover brightened up wherever she stood or sat. She used a serviceable pen found in the same store, and had a whole stash of unopened boxes of pencils and biros in her personal area.

She didn't write stories, or poetry, or anything like that. Those things required her to think beyond the present moment, the here-and-now existence that was the only thing keeping her sane. Plus, she'd never been very good at English in school. Where she imagined flowing prose and skilful imagery, she wrote clunky paragraphs, full of ugly metaphors that she scribbled out so hard she tore the paper. A diary involved writing about her own experiences, which were bad enough living through the first time. So she jotted down lyrics to songs she could remember, old quotes and one-liners, and doodled silly things in the margins like bumblebees and floating eyes. Sometimes she just tapped the paper with the end of her pen as a means to mark the seconds passing and enjoy each one.

She was currently trying to remember the words to _Ding Dong the Witch is Dead_, having written out all the other songs from _The Wizard of Oz_, but the last verse was proving difficult. She looked up from where the notebook was balanced on her knees, lit by the glow of the fire Cyborg was cooking their meal on – rabbit for most, baked beans for Raven and Beast Boy. Two cans from their rapidly diminishing stockpile sat in the centre of the flames.

"They done yet?" Beast Boy asked. He was playing Cat's Cradle with a piece of string.

Cyborg consulted his inner chronometer. "Not yet."

"How long?"

"About three and a half minutes."

"Aw, man." Beast Boy leaned backwards, rolling his eyes. "I'll have starved to death by then."

Raven was levitating near the ceiling. Her eyes flicked down at him, then back to her book. It was a thick tome, but not the one with the burned-off cover. This one had looped writing in some unknown language, interspersed with pictures of stars and what looked like mouths with big teeth.

Terra called up to her. "Hey, Ray? Whatcha reading?"

"My name is Raven. And I doubt you'd understand it, even if I told you."

"Aw, go on," Terra insisted. "Try me."

Raven sighed and reeled off what sounded like a cough mixed with a phlegmy sneeze and an obscene word. It took one of the remaining three minutes to say it all. When she was finished, Terra blinked.

"Uh… okay. Can I get that in English?"

"If I translated it, the words would cause your brain to liquefy and drip out your ears, which would then shrivel, drop off and burn through the ground."

Terra made a face. "Nice."

Cyborg raised an eyebrow. "Y'all really know how to kill a conversation, Raven."

Raven said nothing.

"Shh." Beast Boy held a finger to his lips. "Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're pestawing Wavens." He shifted into as cute and fluffy a bunny as he could, and batted impossibly long lashes at her.

"Your childish behaviour isn't funny," she replied without looking up. The near-presence of an exclamation point in her voice was enough to convince Terra that she hated them all.

"I think he is most adorable," Starfire declared. She scooped Beast Boy into her arms and squeezed him hard enough that, had he possessed stuffing, it would have been hugged out of him. He wiggled and gasped and made a great show of covering up just how much he enjoyed it.

Terra laughed. It felt good to laugh. There wasn't much cause for laughter anymore, and as with all simple pleasures, you didn't notice how much you missed it until you did it again after a long dry spell. Cyborg guffawed loudly, poking fun at BB, and even Robin gave one of those enigmatic smiles that made you think he was a smidge more Boy than Wonder. It made Terra lean back and try to soak up the moment, so she could remember and relive it in darker times.

Because there were always darker times.

When she did, she noticed that Raven was feigning disinterest and watching them all from the corner of her eye. She was the master of disguising her emotions, or just plain denying them. Yet Terra, for whatever reason, thought she could glimpse a kind of hunger in her right then; like she wanted to join in, but couldn't, or at least couldn't bring herself to.

Then Raven met her gaze and her face slammed shut. She went back to reading for real, and Terra spent a moment in contemplative silence, before sinking back into the lower part of the cave and the warmer, more comfortable part of the team. They folded around her, and she laughed and talked and wrote and laughed some more. But it was a long time before she forgot that lonely figure by the ceiling.

* * *

Raven and Robin were arguing again. They did that a lot. Probably it was because their personalities were similar enough to step on each other's toes, yet different enough to conflict on outside problems. This time it was about recruiting. Robin thought they needed to pad out the ranks. Raven didn't trust anyone enough to ask for their help.

"You're being unreasonable," he said. "We can't deal with this on our own anymore. It's too big for us. When are you going to accept that? When we're all _dead_?"

"If you try to find Jinx and Gizmo so you can ask them to join us then that might be faster in coming."

Terra hadn't meant to eavesdrop. Honest. She'd been looking for Cyborg, and BB had told her he was around Robin's personal area. He wasn't, perhaps having been scared off by this rapidly intensifying altercation – the same one that was now gluing Terra's feet to the floor with curiosity.

Who were Jinx and Gizmo? And what was up with not wanting more firepower in the ranks? More allies meant less chance of going splat, right? And she was a real big fan of not going splat.

Robin made a strangled noise. "Okay, I understand about those two. But Aqualad? What've you got against him?"

"He has other commitments to Atlantis. He'd always have divided loyalties. Would you trust your life to someone who deserted us once before?"

"That was an exception - "

"There are no exceptions. Every time is important."

"His King was dying! His _father_ was dying."

"And we might have died because he abandoned his post when we needed him. You can't excuse him for that, Robin. He let us down, and there's nothing to suggest he wouldn't do it again if Atlantis called him."

Terra could easily imagine Robin's expression at that moment: jaw set, eyes narrowed, brow pulled together in such a way as bunched his mask on the bridge of his nose. He might even be snorting slightly, a sign of escalating irritation.

Robin wasn't exactly quick to anger, but it was sometimes difficult to know if he was pissed at you or not. His self-control hid too many complex, convoluted layers to count, much less see or try to understand. He was a master of contradiction, of concealing his true self behind a mask – any mask.

As far as Terra could judge, something had happened in Robin's life that made him feel he constantly needed to prove himself. She didn't know what. He wasn't someone who talked about his past much, even though secret identities didn't count for squat anymore.

The truth, however, was that whatever had made Robin insecure and so resolute to prove himself worked to the Titans' advantage in this new world. Maybe all real heroes had some sot of 'got to be a manly man' thing going on at the backs of their minds. Maybe they all were so brave and courageous and strong because they needed to prove that they could do this thing, be worthy of this heroic calling. Maybe it had been that way before everything went bad.

Maybe.

Regardless of the reasons behind it, whenever they crawled from their caves and struck out into the ruins of Jump, the Titans all turned to Robin as leader – even Raven – and he accepted the burden. It was unfair of them, but they did it. Robin was the responsible one, the one with the plan. He was the Boy Wonder. There was a lot to be said for that kind of mythos in this kind of landscape.

But it was unfair, really, and Terra was reminded of that fact as she listened in. Raven spoke a lot of truth in her arguments. There was a lot of her natural suspicion in there, too, but there was also hard, ugly truth. Robin couldn't get around that, and the slightly desperate note he'd adopted showed he knew it.

He was trapped by her. He was trapped by them – his squad, his friends and teammates. He had to be brave and strong. He couldn't let himself fail. Failure was not an option. He had to be the strong one, and they accepted and used that, even though there was something to it that made Terra feel a little squeamish. Robin was tough. He was dependable. Robin was the Titans' leader. He was the Boy Wonder. But every time she saw him do his thing, that thing, the thing that made him Robin, it felt like putting an anorexic in charge of a food stash, or hiring an obsessive-compulsive to clean your house. It got the job done, and done well, but was it right?

The lines to everything were so blurry now.

There was a time she never would have even considered doubting Robin as leader. Then again, there was also a time she'd thought Superman was invincible, that life was a constant thing, and that her world stretched to the schoolyard and the grocery store at the end of her street.

"What about Thunder and Lightning?"

Raven's distaste was almost palpable. "Too unpredictable."

"People change, Raven," Robin insisted.

"Do we even know if they can die or not?"

"Well, no…"

"They're elementals, so it's unlikely. So how can we be sure this entire business isn't just some colossal game to them? If they don't feel threatened, they won't work as hard. And who picks up the slack if that happens? We do, of course. We always pick up the slack."

"We wouldn't have to if we had more people on the team."

"Look, there might be something to having more individuals on our side. _Might _being the operative word. We just have to be careful who we approach."

"Raven," Robin said slowly, "we don't have a lot of options. If they're alive and willing, those are two really high points in their favour. It's not like we can hold auditions and weed out the weaker candidates. We need help, and we need it soon. You saw Cy's stats on the Misshapen population. Pretty soon we're going to be overwhelmed if we stay as a six person unit."

"Be that as it may, you're being rash - "

"No, I'm not. I'm trying to do what's best with the resources we've got to hand. And you're _really_ not helping. Seriously, Raven, your trust issues are going above their jurisdiction."

"_You're _trying to do what's best. _I'm _trying to make sure what you think is best really _is_ the optimum decision for all concerned."

"You trusted Terra enough to sanction her membership. And we'd barely even met her."

There was a long silence. Terra held her breath. When the voices came again, they were low and soft. She missed a lot of what was said, but sensed a new tension coating the area. Raven sounded pissed. She spoke in short, sharp sentences. Robin replied in a somewhat subdued tone, which was unusual for him. Once or twice Terra was sure she heard Raven muttering that strange incantation of hers.

When it became apparent that she wasn't going to hear any more juice without blowing her cover, she slipped away, resuming her search for Cyborg with a few new questions in her mind.

* * *

"What do Raven's weird words mean?"

Beast Boy tipped his head forward and blinked rapidly. "Huh?"

Terra waved a hand, as if swatting a fly. "Avalon metronome zincky. What's it mean?"

"Oh." Understanding crept into his face. "Um… not sure."

She punched his arm – missed. He slewed to one side and gurgled a damp snigger.

Amazingly, the bottle of Famous Grouse whisky he'd found in the rubble was still intact. The lid had been on and everything, leading them to half-wonder where the owner had gone. They didn't dwell on it long. There had been a few brownish-red stains on the label, so they tore it off. They were both underage, but that hardly mattered either, and it made Terra's brain only a little more fried than usual.

"You're a fat lot of use," she said as she reached for the bottle. He gave it up easily, taking advantage of his newly freed hands to rub at his eyes.

"Better than being a skinny lot of use."

"How?"

"Um… because… because bigger is better."

"Whatever happened to 'size doesn't matter'?"

"That's always been a load of crock. People made it up to compensate for… stuff." He sniggered again.

Terra punched him on the arm. This time her hit connected. "You're such a prude, BB."

"Am not! I've got a feelthy leetle mind."

"Are too." Terra tipped her head back and her throat moved as she swallowed.

Changing the subject, Beast Boy whistled. "Pretty good. For a chick."

"Oh please. Keep your chauvinist comments for someone who thinks size doesn't matter." She wiped at her mouth with the back of her wrist, sending a sooty smudge up one cheek. "Anyway, all the 'chicks' you know could kick your ass in a heartbeat. I should get a bunch of us together to teach you… teach you your place." She wobbled a little. Her head felt pleasantly fuggy.

"Okay, kidding, kidding." He held his hands up in defence. "I take it back, my little feminist."

Terra nodded and took a quick gulping shot straight from the neck of the bottle before passing it back. The whisky burned as it went down, but her throat had been numbed after the first taste. Warmth radiated from the pit of her belly.

"Do you trust me?" she asked suddenly.

"Huh?" Beast Boy seemed puzzled, and it was only half to do with the Grouse.

"Do you trust me?"

"Well, sure. Why shouldn't I?"

"No reason. Just curious."

He squinted at her and shook his head. "You're weird, even for a girl."

"Weirder than Raven?" she said slyly.

The bottle paused on its way to his mouth. "Okay, so maybe you're _slightly_ less weird than ol' dismal britches."

Terra snickered, absently hiding it behind one hand. "Miss Can-find-the-cloud-around-the-silver-lining."

"Exactamundo." He knocked back three quick swallows and sat just opening and closing his mouth for a second. "I think you're about as weird as Star when she's cooking."

"Why thank you." Terra made a sort-of bow and nearly fell off her rock. "Whoa - "

Beast Boy grabbed at her, hand closing around her upper arm and yanking her back into place. He'd given up trying to find a replacement left glove, but kept the right one on for some reason. Terra didn't know why. It was battered and thin enough to be little protection. Filled with new inclination to ask questions, she quizzed him on it.

He looked at the glove like he'd never seen it before. "Huh. I dunno why I wear it. Superstition, maybe. Maybe it's my good luck charm."

"Does it work?"

"I'm still here, aren't I?"

"Point."

"So… do you trust me?"

"Weirdo."

Beast Boy's brows pulled together. "No fair. I answered when you asked. Now you gotta do the same for me."

"Why?"

"'Cause it's good manners. S'polite. Etiquette n' protocol n' all that junk." He was slurring his words a little more now, and scrubbing furiously at his left eye. It watered when he took his palm away.

"I think you're drunk," Terra informed him.

"Sure. Whatever. So, answer my question? Or do I have t'force an answer by getting all medieval on yer ass?"

"You keep away from my ass, perv."

"_I'm_ the perv?" He seemed shocked. "Since when? I'm a total gennelman."

"Yeah, sure. Totally."

"You insult my honour, fair maiden!"

She shoved him. "Oh, dry up Lake Melodrama, BB."

He squeaked and nearly toppled over backwards. A malformed tail sprang to his aid, but the alcohol had obviously warped his powers of concentration. It crumpled bonelessly and he went sprawling, Famous Grouse slopping everywhere.

Terra giggled. It burbled up her throat and propelled itself between her teeth, coming out as a snorting hiss, like the neck of a full balloon opening and closing in quick succession.

Beast Boy jumped to his feet, the bottle still on the floor. He spent a few seconds patting himself down until he noticed it. Then he groaned. "Aw, man. You made me do a spill-kill. You must be punished."

"Ooh, I'm so scared," Terra said, sounding less scared than she ever had before in her life. "Whatcha gonna do, klutz me to death? Make me bust a gut laughing?" She giggled some more, appreciating the liberating sensation and only stopping only when she noticed she was the only one laughing. "BB?"

He stared at her oddly, head tilted to one side like that cute puppy-dog he sometimes shifted. He blinked a lot, but she got the impression it was less to do with the booze in his system, and more to do with him just generally trying to concentrate really hard. The expression didn't look right on him. It was as if someone had painted a frown over his smile in magic marker, but you knew the picture that was supposed to be there, the one underneath.

But then… that was a lot of what made him Beast Boy. After a fashion. Terra always got the feeling he'd ended up as someone he wasn't really sure how to be.

"Don't you trust me?" he asked quietly and with forced earnestness.

She sighed. "'Course I do. You're my best friend, remember?"

The weird expression faded. His eyes lit up. "Cool." He climbed back up to sit next to her. "So… best friend, huh?"

"I never told you that before?"

"Don't think so."

"Really?"

"Um…" He tapped the side of his head with two knuckles. "Well. Maybe? It's possible I forgot."

"You make me feel so appreciated."

"I should. That's what best friends are s'posed to do, right?" His grin showed fangs, but it was less than terrifying.

"What, is there some sort of handbook I didn't know about? I feel uninformed."

"Chapter Three, Subsection Two, parts one through six," Beast Boy intoned. "A best friend should always make a person feel good about themselves in whatever way possible."

"By forgetting they _are_ a person's best friend?"

"Minor detail."

"Goofball."

"I don't think that's very good BFF behaviour, missy."

"BFF?"

"Best Friends Forever."

Terra arched her eyebrows. "We progressed quick, didn't we? Two minutes ago you didn't even know you were my best friend. Now we're into blood pacts and interesting wordplay."

"Hey, whoa, less of the blood pact thing. I like the red stuff right where it is, thankyouverymuch."

She stared at her feet. Her belly still held a burning residue, but the edges of her mind had started to twinge with lucidity. She was going to have a hell of a hangover after this. And after all those theories of metahumans having increased healing abilities, too. Huh. Go figure.

"BB, I think we may have skipped a vital part of this formula."

"Like what? We've got the witty repartee, the bonding, the shared experiences, the conversation over drinks." He checked each one off on his fingers. "All the things vital to create BFF."

"So how come I still don't know your real name?"

The moment froze. It dripped ice. Beast Boy's gaze became fixed on some point in the middle distance.

"BB - " Terra started, but he cut her off.

"Shh. Someday it might still matter."

She frowned. "What might? The secret identity schtick?"

He nodded.

"Oh, come _on_. If and when civilisation rebuilds itself, that's not going to be its first concern. Besides, you know _my_ real name."

"Yeah, but that was different. You gotta admit, the way you joined up wasn't exactly usual. You didn't even sign a contract saying you wouldn't tell."

"What, and you did?" She laughed. Then she looked at him and her eyes widened. "My gosh, you _did_. Wait, let me guess: Robin's doing?"

Beast Boy shrugged. "Something like that."

Terra thought for a moment. She clutched her thumb in one fist, squeezing and unsqueezing, cutting off the blood supply and letting it back in again. "Did this contract have anything in it about what you can and can't say after the apocalypse? You know – after all lawyers who could call you on it have gone bye-bye?"

"Uh… Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't exactly read all of it."

"Why does that not surprise me?" She sighed. "Come on, BB. It's not like the world'll end if you tell me what's written on your birth certificate." She snorted a little at the unintended irony.

Beast Boy shifted his feet, rearranging himself on his perch. He twisted his boots a little in that way he did when he was wriggling his toes. "It will if Robin finds out."

"As if. He's got enough to worry about without our chitchat." Terra thought of Robin and Raven's argument. She thought of the way Starfire looked at Robin like he was torn wet paper, and the way his jaw set rigid whenever they were too late at a scene.

"You don't know Robin. He's so anal retentive he practically breathes through his colon."

"Ew. _Not _a mental image I needed."

Beast Boy gave her a rakish grin that only pulled at one side of his mouth. His eyes seemed flat, perhaps a little cloudy still from the whisky. He still blinked a lot, and his left eye was pinkish where it should have been white.

"You look really terrible, you know that?"

"Gee, thanks," he sarcasmed. "You're not exactly catch of the day yourself."

Instinctively, Terra reached up and tried to pat down her hair. It was full of snarls and knots that made it poof above her head in interesting peaks and troughs. One side was a little ironed out because she'd slept on it, but the rest looked like it'd just got in from the Windy City. Her face was streaked with dust and dirt and everything else that refused to come off without soap they didn't have, and she knew there weren't bags under her eyes so much as industrial sized black bin-liners.

"I'm thinking the freshly-crawled-out-a-tumble-drier look is going to be really big this season," she said, pretending to finger-comb the split-ends. She hit three snags within two seconds, all of which yanked at the roots. "…Owie…"

Beast Boy didn't try to hide his snigger. "Who's the goofball, again?"

"Oh ha ha, real funny. You should go on the comedy circuit."

"Nu-uh, tried that. Being introduced as the 'Giant Lima-Bean' isn't one of my life's high-points."

"Giant Lima-Bean? You're kidding, right?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

She looked at him for a long moment, trying to figure out the truth in that remark. Beast Boy flashed her an even wider smile that threatened to split his face in two.

"Goofball," she finally pronounced.

"No, you're the goofball," he replied.

"Goofball times a hundred."

"Goofball times a thousand."

"Goofball times a million-billion-trillion."

"Goofball times infinity."

"Goofball times - " Terra began, but stopped when Beast Boy leaned forward and pressed his mouth over hers. He was at an awkward angle, one elbow locked, the other hand braced against the rock to stop him falling off. The kiss itself was a little sloppy and bitter tasting, and not at all how she'd imagine her first kiss would be. It lasted all of a few seconds before he pulled away.

Terra just blinked at him.

"Um…" he said sheepishly. He bounced one heel off the rock in a clumsy rhythm. "Sorry. But you can't get bigger than infinity, anyway. So I was saving you from saying something stupid."

"That's what that was?"

"Sure."

"You were saving me from saying something dumb."

"Uh-huh."

"Because you can't get bigger than infinity."

"Yup."

She shook her head, hiding a small smile. "You goofball."

He paused a second, before saying quietly, "Garfield the Goofball, if you don't mind."

And Terra felt warm inside for quite a different reason.

* * *

**To Be Continued...**

* * *

It made sense to me, **Jefepato**.

Beast Boy is a bit of a bugger to write, so you'll get no arguments from me there, **Water81**. He's just so ... capricious, but he's exhibited a serious side in the show before, and it's difficult to make the two match up in a way that isn't wildly OOC.

Aw, thank you, **Forlorn Melody**. I don't believe you, but it was sweet to say that about my work anyway.

Will do, **Squeegee779**. And there are really 776 other people called Squeegee on this site? O.o

I figured that ina seeting like this, romance would come second to survival in the character's books. That said, here's some of that smooching Beast Boy and Terra missed out on in the canon, **Raven's Girlfriend**. And I agree, those who abuse Terra's character deserve disdain. She's massively complex, provided you don't judge her by appearances only - as I tried to emphasise in my other fic _The Sound of Silence_. Pimppimppimp

Tergon rubbing off on me? Witht the kinds of things we write together, **UnknownSource**, that could be _so_ very misinterpreted. Regardless, I'm pleased you liked the last two chapters, seeing as how they were written for you an' all.


	4. Speedy

**A/N** – This chapter is incredibly, exceptionally, _embarrassingly_ short. I know it might irk some people now, but trust me when I say the next chapter wouldn't have worked had I tacked any of it the end onto this one. Please bear with me. I promise I know what I'm doing.

* * *

**4. Speedy **

* * *

They had a new teammate. His name was Speedy, though he wasn't especially fast. He had no special powers – no enlarged brain, no robotic parts or genetic augmentation. He wasn't even a metahuman.

But he _had _worked with Green Arrow for most of his superheroing career, and he was something of a genius in projectile weaponry. Like his mentor, he favoured a souped-up bow and plethora of arrows, a lot of them more than simple pieces of wood. It made him almost useless in combat that was up close and personal, but great at taking out enemies from a distance. He poked around in the wreckage of the lower-east side a lot, where the laboratories and factories used to stand, and did wonders with what he found. Sometimes, even Cyborg was impressed.

He said he'd come to Jump because he was ineffectual anywhere else. He didn't talk about why he wasn't with Green Arrow anymore. The Titans presumed it was because he was dead – not because of anything Speedy had said or done, but because it was the way so many heroes' stories had ended.

Terra felt a little intimidated by Speedy. He was a seasoned fighter, and it showed in everything he did. Yet he was also dispirited enough that he allowed Robin to remain leader when he could have challenged – and perhaps even beaten – him. He wore a mask over his eyes, but there was pain to the set of his jaw and an arrogance that sometimes echoed in the slope of his shoulders. And, like always, nobody quizzed him on it. It was the etiquette of the new millennium.

But there was something about Speedy that also endeared him to the Titans, Terra included. With him on board, she was no longer the newbie – at least, not in the truest sense of the word. She found herself pleased when she had to explain the workings of Jump to him – the infrequent chaos vents, the nests they'd already destroyed, the theories they had on the increasing Misshapen population. Speedy listened and nodded in all the right places. He wasn't much of a talker, but he was a good listener.

He'd lived a colourful life that he talked about in shades of grey, when he talked about it. Yet there were also slashes of colour to his personality – hot reds and yellows and other startling hues that showed up mostly on the battlefield. Times like that, they were all glad he was on their side. There was an air about him that suggested a boy-man whose adherence to military-style discipline was cut only by an understanding that soldiers are also people. He knew a vast number of dirty jokes and could tell them without ruining his own mystique. He once found an unbroken mirror, of the type women used to keep in their handbags for a quick make-up check in taxis and powder rooms. He kept it in the part of the caves he was assigned as though it were his most prized possession next to his bow, quiver and arrows. He was smart and sharp and tactical. And he was always armed.

Raven hated him. She glowered every time he appeared, sparing him the full evil eye only because the last part was reserved for Robin. Whatever she'd said when they did the group-huddle thing, whatever surrender of judgment she'd made, admitting Speedy into the Titans had been a unanimous decision in nothing but strategy. They needed firepower. They needed manpower. In Speedy they got both, but that didn't mean Raven had to like it.

Terra watched them sitting across from each other, the small fire a bright wall between them. They talked, but not to each other. They looked around and made eye contact, but only to their lefts and rights. Once, Speedy cleared his throat and asked Raven if she needed any help with what she was doing. Raven replied by levitating from the room with her hood up.

Terra watched her go, a coppery taste in her mouth. Her lip was so nibbled it had started to bleed.

* * *

Raven was 'broadcasting' Starfire's mental signature into space. It had taken Cyborg months to scrounge enough spare parts to construct some sort of amplifier for it. More than once he'd pulled all-nighters trying to figure out a match between Raven's spiritual powers and Earth technology that would serve their purpose. Now, after some prudent suggestions by Speedy and the donation of a combustible arrowhead for fuel, they were kicking.

Terra had taken up a spot outside the part of the cave they were using. Raven had called for complete solitude to help her work to the best of her abilities, so they'd set up a blockade of sorts across the cave entrance. Starfire had assured everyone that Tamaranean court habitually kept a collection of psychics around. Traditionally, they were to help the Emperor prepare for war, but they could also pick up signals from off-planeters if they had to.

Terra wasn't sure why she was there, since the other two girls were progressing quite well without her. She had nothing to add to the procedure, no way of helping. By rights, she should have been catching some downtime while she could – writing in her notebook or napping. Instead she sat there, knees pulled up to her chest, staring at nothing.

There's no such thing as complete silence. Still, it was pretty unnerving to get that close. Terra listened to herself breathing, regulated her breaths to form a sort of pattern, and experimented with how long she could hold in a lungful without going light-headed. She raised her hand and traced patterns on the opposite wall, counted the cracks in the ceiling, and wondered for the millionth time what she was doing there.

_I'm standing guard_, she told herself, just like she'd told Beast Boy when he asked. _I'm like those dudes with the big hats outside Buckingham Palace. Only female and blonde and American. And stuff._ ­

All cities were the same underground, she figured. Not in the subways and the basements, but deeper. Go far enough, and there was always bedrock, ancient stone that knew stories about when the world had never heard of man. It was a little humbling, to be surrounded by something that remembered a time before your ancestors were beyond the single-cell stage. Humbling, and comforting, because something that old, that wise was too vast to be bothered about what they did down here. It would protect them without judging them. It would keep them safe, whoever they were and however they felt about each other.

The creak and grind of metal on stone. Terra jerked her head up; at the same moment realising it had dropped forward onto her chest. Shit, she'd been asleep? Some guard.

By the time she had sat up properly, Raven was standing there. Her cloak was wrapped tight, shielding every inch of her below the neck. Her eyes were not quite blank, but still closed off.

"Did it work?" Terra asked, scrambling to her feet. "Did you get through to Tameran?"

Starfire appeared over Raven's shoulder. By contrast, her expression spoke only of unbridled sadness. It made Terra's heart sink.

"You didn't make it, did you?"

"We achieved contact," said Raven.

"And?"

"The… Empress," Starfire said slowly, as if testing the measure of truth in her words, "does not wish to concern Tameran with the troubles of Earth. She determines this planet's woes as unimportant, as they do not distress my… her homeworld, and so she has declined our request for aid."

Terra's heart was back in her lower bowel. It stayed there this time. "Oh."

"Indeed. Oh." Starfire's gaze was rooted to the floor.

Terra craned her neck back, appraising. "There's something you're not telling me."

Starfire bit her lip. She bowed her head, blinking rapidly. Terra had no idea whether Tamaraneans could cry like humans did, but it sure looked similar – albeit with green tears.

"Star?"

It was Raven who answered, stepping in front of Starfire as if to shield her. It was a strange thing to see without the swell of battle around them to prompt it. Consideration just wasn't something Raven _did. _"The Empress has invoked her powers of state and excommunicated Starfire," she said simply.

"Excuse me?"

"She's been officially cut off and told not to come back."

"Dwa - ? They can't do that!"

Raven's face was stony. "They can. And they did."

Terra looked between them. Then she hung her head. "Aw, crap."

* * *

Starfire was the toughest person Terra had even known, second only to Superman in sheer physical resilience. Yet Robin treated her like she was made of glass. He didn't hesitate to send her out of dangerous assignments, but he spoke to her like a harsh word might kill her. When they were gathered around the fire and he reached for her hand, he held it very, very gently. Nobody had even realised he _could_ be that gentle.

Cyborg wore a smug, I-told-you-so expression in between the oh-crap-this-is-bad-and-we're-all-gonna-die expressions. When Terra, Speedy and Beast Boy went scavenging for mechanical parts with him, he couldn't keep from mentioning how he'd seen that one coming a mile off.

Beast Boy hit him upside the head with a rotten banana skin.

* * *

**To Be Continued… **

* * *

_Again, apologies for the shortness. I feel such a fraud…_

**Review Replies! **

You know something, **Water81**? Of all the reviews I've ever received, I've never been told anything I wrote was special. So thank you for that. You really made my day.

A little more sense, **Squeegee779**. And regarding the triangle element of the fic … I ain't sayin' nuthin'!

Um … thank you, **Serve the Abbalah**?

Having read over your review, **Raven's Girlfriend**, I have a feeling you'll like upcoming events. And that's all I'm going to say.

Shall do, **AnimationWickedRaven**!

I've recently been both ill and busy with university demands, **Jefepato**, (dissertation, exams, presentations, several other essays, job and PGCE interviews and some other stuff) so when I got time to write I wanted to write new things rather than go over old stuff. And since most of what I have for _Strange Glue_ was written in 2004, it kind of got put on the back burner. I'm making excuses, I know, but if you were wondering why then now you know. ;;

As I said last time, **Forlorn Melody**, I originally wrote Strange Glue as a single story, but it eventually grew too long to be uploaded that way. However, the jumpy timeline was intrinsic to the nature of the original plan, and I felt I couldn't go back and 'fix' things without ruining the little bits and pieces I was, for once, proud of (trust me, I'm rarely proud of what I write). Still, later on things _do _get a little smoother, and the time-jumps aren't so glaring, so maybe that'll be better for its new multi-chaptered form.

Cheers, **TheAlabamaKid**.


	5. The Observatory

**

* * *

**

**5. The Observatory **

* * *

The Titans had been separated for three nights. Terra and Speedy were holed up in the old Observatory with a dozen injured kids and teens. The others were somewhere across town. Neither group could leave what they were doing, and contact was brief. Cyborg's radios needed new batteries they didn't have, and Raven couldn't 'talk' for long periods. In truth, she communicated mainly by transmitting images directly into their brains – a piece of burnt landscape, the stench of fear, the feeling of nearby restlessness. As she'd told everyone at least thrice, she was an empath, not a full telepath.

The radios were more of a worry, since they reminded everyone about the problems Cyborg was having with his own recharger. Infiltration by a stray Misshapen had left his power pack damaged, so that whenever Cyborg used it to recharge himself, he leeched out power that wasn't replaced. To make matters worse, the damage was irreparable. He'd given it three weeks, tops, before it stopped working. He'd given himself another forty-eight hours after that before his vital systems went offline. And he'd said it all with a straight face.

That was why she and Speedy had been dispatched up here, to see if there was anything they'd missed on previous missions that might make a new power source, or patch up the existing one. Robin had argued. He did that a lot when they tried to make their own decisions, so that sometimes she wanted to sock him instead of be grateful that he was looking out for her welfare. However, as Terra had said when she finally convinced him to let them go, "We weren't looking for this before. We might have brushed over something because it wasn't what we were looking for _then, _but it's what we're looking for _now_."

As it turned out, they hadn't found anything resembling useful. Instead, what they'd found was a small group of kids no older than themselves, courting survival by hiding in plain sight. It had worked, too, until the Misshapens realised they were there and laid siege to the place.

It was late. Speedy was on watch outside. Terra was making the rounds, in and out of whatever bed-things were available. Nobody here was Titans material. They were all civilians, and viewed her with a sort of reverence as she passed. Part of her was pleased, but another part wanted to yell at them to stop it and do something to save themselves other than hide away and hope for the best. Passivity was yesterday's news. The only way for survival now was to be prepared to fight for it.

There was a girl no older than thirteen or fourteen sitting up and feeding her baby. It latched onto her nipple the way babies have always done, and the scene was so familiar and instinctive that it was almost possible to believe that there wasn't a campaign to wipe them all out going on in the rest of the city.

Speedy came in. He had someone leaning on his shoulder and thick greenish liquid splashed on his face. Terra didn't recognise the new girl. She was sallow, thin as a rake, and also missing one eye and part of her lower lip, but they were old wounds compared to the fresh cuts on her arms and legs. She stared the I-was-just-nearly-killed stare, as she was helped to sit down in an available space and Terra brought over a bowl of water to clean her up. They couldn't sacrifice clean drinking water when they didn't know how long they'd be here, but she made sure it wasn't _too_ filthy.

Speedy waited for a moment, standing over them. "You okay?" he eventually asked in that 'Okay, I did something, now how do I deal with this next bit?' voice he sometimes got.

Terra thought he'd asked the girl, so she didn't answer until he poked her on the shoulder. "Hm? Oh, yeah, we're cool. Everyone's fed and bedded down for the night, with strict orders not to go outside." They'd lost one boy, Nathan, the previous evening when he thought himself above the rules. The others had been much easier to convince since they heard him screaming and Speedy came back inside shaking his head. He couldn't sacrifice arrows when there was no hope, and none had gone from his quiver.

Speedy frowned, indicating this wasn't quite what he'd been asking. Eventually he nodded and went back to keep watch for any other stragglers who'd wandered up the hill. It was like some sort of warped homing instinct, drawing the kids to each other.

Nobody was entirely sure what they'd do with the kids. They couldn't just abandon them, but on this hill they were sitting ducks. Some crackpot had obviously made this their base before, since there were stores of food, maps and a few candles and the like in anterooms. But with so many mouths to feed those supplies couldn't last forever…

The new girl watched Terra while she bathed her cuts. Her one eye was midnight blue and long-lashed, impossibly pretty given the state of the rest of her. Her hair was dirty with the same green blood as on Speedy, but might have been blonde underneath. Her skin had a yellowish tinge that indicated malnutrition. When Terra broke off to wring out the rag, she reached into her shirt and brought out a small locket with a ridiculously fine chain.

"It ain't much, but it's all I got," the girl said. "Is it enough? Can I stay here for awhile, please?"

Terra paused a moment, then pushed the locket back into her hands. "You can stay, sure. But we don't need that kind of payment."

"Why? You lookin' to get your jollies instead? 'Cause I'll go back outside if that's it."

"What - ? No! We're the Teen Titans," Terra asserted, as if that would explain everything.

The girl's eye narrowed. "No you ain't. I saw the Titans before. You ain't them."

"Yeah, well, we are. So deal with it. I'm Terra, he's Speedy." Terra gestured at the passage Speedy had gone through. "We're the upgraded squad. I'd show you the communicator, but I left it in my other pants." Her voice was not totally devoid of sarcasm.

The girl opened her mouth to say more, but a shriek cut across them both. Terra looked up to see a girl with dark curly hair and olive skin stumbling through the sleeping people. Ella, she thought her name was. Spoke with an accent. Been there when they first arrived.

The effect on the new girl was electric. She stood up, knocking over the bowl of precious water and not stopping to apologise. Terra's knees were soaked within a few seconds – the time it took for them to meet and wrap their arms around each other. The naked relief in their eyes was almost scary in its intensity.

"I thought you were dead", Ella gulped out between sobs, running her fingertips across the new girl's bruised skin and torn mouth. "I thought I would never be seeing you again."

"As if," the new girl replied. "You know the deal. I'll always come back."

And then they were kissing. Not sisterly peck-on-the-cheek kissing, or a French either-side-of-the-face air smooch, but genuine lip-locking, drinking each other down the way that took three pages to describe in romance books. Ella had tears on her cheeks. They didn't seem to care that they had most of the room's attention. The whole world was falling apart, and they were kissing like they'd never been happier.

Terra watched them for a second, and then silently went about cleaning up the spilt water to salvage what she could of it.

* * *

So many of them had become like children again. The teenagers who, in another world, would have spent Saturday afternoons combing CD racks and ducking in and out of the mall, had faces wide open with childishness. It wasn't that they made the effort, per se, but when hope disappears, when you find you've even given up hoping for the possibility of hope, you tend to fill the spaces left behind with dreams – little childlike stories to keep you going. Even the most hardened of people have trouble stopping themselves at that stage.

So it was with these kids. They weren't even really conscious of it, they just did it. Without fuss or prelude, they would break off from what they were doing, sit down, and talk about the desires welling up inside them.

Food was a favourite topic, of course. Often Terra would overhear a cluster of them describing a meal in painstaking detail. They ranged from five course dinners to McDonalds and KFC, but each telling was exhaustive, starting from the method of preparation, of waiting by the counter and smelling the hot grease, going into the taste of each bite, not stopping until everything was in the belly. The conversations would sometimes go on for hours, and had the kind of rigorous protocol that said they'd been going on long before she arrived on the scene. Nobody was to laugh at a teller, and nobody could let their hunger overcome them, because that led to tears, and nothing spoiled a food conversation faster than crying. Eric was seventeen, but he'd told Terra to her face that there was even some nutritional value in the food talks – provided you had a strong enough desire to believe the words being spoken, of course.

"Of course," Terra replied sincerely.

There were lots of wishes floating around, too; sentences that grew from those two simple words: 'I wish…' These also had protocol. The wishes had to be something that could never happen, something big and rare and unattainable. Apparently, it made the game more fun, gave it an extra zest and encouraged their imaginations to run wild. While they were sick with dreaming they weren't sick with fear.

"I wish the sun would never set," said one.

"I wish the ocean was filled with strawberry soda," said another.

"I wish mermaids would come and take us away to their undersea kingdom."

"I wish I could ride a golden cloud all over the world." That one was from Nancy, the one-eyed girl, curled close into Ella's side. They'd barely let go of each other since she arrived.

"I wish I could be flying," Ella said next in her soft burr.

"I wish flowers would grow in my pockets."

"I wish I could trip over a diamond as big as my head."

"I wish butterflies would come out of the taps."

"I wish I had a swimming pool of chocolate to swim in."

"I wish the city would be like the old days."

Terra had no taste for these games. She refused to participate, but she would to one side and listen. Listening to them made her feel … strange. Hopeful in some ways, hopeless in others. Nobody should have to go through what these kids had been through. They were mostly orphans, or else hadn't a clue where their parents were. Brian and Isabel were brother and sister, but none of the others were related. They'd just gravitated together, some from wandering the streets, some from defunct survivor compounds, a handful of children against a world of creatures the grown-ups didn't understand and couldn't handle.

"I wish the monsters would go back under the bed…"

* * *

The Observatory was burning. It scorched Terra's cheeks to stand here, so close to the conflagration. It dried out her eyes to look at it, but she couldn't stop. There were streak-marks on her face where the blaze had dried her tears.

Speedy had tied a tourniquet around his upper left thigh. One of the Misshapens had made a deep gouge there, and though he'd fought on while he could, now it was a case of sit down or fall down.

The smell of gore had been replaced by the scent of roasting meat.

"Cy was right," Terra said softly. "People _are_ changing. More of them every day."

Eric and Brian had woken in the night. Except they hadn't been Eric and Brian anymore. Not fully. Neither had Jennifer, or Isabel, or Margaret. They'd torn through the sleeping kids like tissue paper. When Terra brought up a stonewall to shield them, Isabel had smashed through it with her new exoskeleton, while Brian took to the air on gossamer wings.

But Even exoskeletons could burn.

Speedy'd had no choice. There had been _no _choice. No other option. No choice. Nothing they could do. No alternative. Nu-uh. Nothing…

Terra remembered Ella's face; open with disbelief for the few precious seconds she should have been running. She'd refused to leave Nancy, even though Nancy's throat had been torn out. Ella had woken to find gouts of her girlfriend's blood pumping into her face where they lay in each other's arms. And in the tiny moments it took for her to realise what was going on and tighten her hold, for Speedy to nock an arrow and let it fly, the creature that had once been Margaret was already on her, ripping and tearing and rending like a thing possessed. Ella never even tried to escape.

Terra remembered having to scoop up one of the little ones and dash for the exit. She remembered a little forehead flopping bonelessly against her, as she realised too late that she'd grabbed an already-dead body. She remembered clutching it close anyway, as if by getting him out she could bring him back to life. She remembered getting outside, debris flying, flames starting to take hold. She remembered screaming at Speedy, "Where are the kids? Why didn't you bring any with you? Why!" and him holding her shoulders, shaking her, telling her they were all gone, it was too late, too late…

Six days and six nights they'd stayed here. Six days and six nights they'd kept this little cluster alive. And what did they have to show for it?

She lay the little one down on the gravel, rearranging his limbs into a more natural position. She didn't have to close his eyes, for which she was grateful. She didn't know if she could've brought herself to touch the half-missing face, with its tiny features and frightened rictus.

She sat there for a moment, until the cries of the dying Misshapens had faded, and the blood began to dry on her clothes and skin. Bits caked in her hair. She stood up, went to the fire – which, by virtue of its location and a few well-placed cryo-arrows, could not spread any further outwards – and summoned a hand of dirt to bring her something flammable. It brought back a table leg, which she used to torch the corpse. She stared at it until the browning blood on her started to flake away. Then, impulsively, she threw a blanket of soil over the Observatory to smother it, to suffocate the fire, to hide the bodies.

It was a poor kind of burial.

Terra sat down next to Speedy and allowed him to lean on her while she yanked loose the rock around them and geokinetically flew it back to the caves. His breathing was quick and shallow. He'd lost a lot of blood. The fact was not lost on her.

Starfire met them, having heard of their spiking distress from Raven. They'd been back two days already. She was all atwitter with anxiety, checking them over for injuries and spiriting Speedy off the moment he told her his wound was 'no biggie'.

Terra's cheeks remained resolutely dry as she found Robin and made her report. She talked in short sentences, answered any questions he had, and waited for him to excuse her. When he did, she walked to her personal area, pulled a piece of wood across the entrance, sat down, took several deep breaths, and hurled her notebook at the wall with such force that the cover tore loose.

She lay and cried dry sobs until the shuffle of footsteps arrived and shifted aside the wood.

"Terra?" said Beast Boy.

Terra said nothing. She didn't even turn to face him, not even when he came over and laid next to her, spooning her body with his own and reaching around to lay a hand over hers. He didn't bother with meaningless palliatives, but it was a comfort to have him there. Nothing brought a dose of existentialist angst back to earth like the solidity of a warm body nearby.

It took over fifteen minutes, but eventually Terra returned the squeeze of his hand.

* * *

****

**_To be Continued ..._**

* * *

_Once again, apologies for things being short. Maybe I should just make that a blanket statement whenever one of these things turns out on the little side. And just say 'flagabah' here as some sort of codeword…_

**Review Replies!**

Lol, I understand what you mean, **Mature Immaturity**.

I wrote Speedy's entrance before I'd seen either part of _Titans East_, **Raven's Girlfriend**, but I liked him anyway, so I was kind of playing fast and loose with his character. His role changes slightly in the next chapter, so watch this space.

Maybe this chapter was more to your liking, **celestial cimmerian catalyst**? I admit, in hindsight I wasn't too happy with the last chapter either, but … well, formatting got away from me. You have to understand that when I was writing these segments, they were all supposed to run on one from the other in a single narrative. Speedy's intro was originally supposed to be followed by the stuff at the Observatory and the stuff that's now _going_ to happen in Chapter Six. Hopefully, when you see it, you'll forgive me for all the explanations.

Um … thank you, **Forlorn Melody**? Yup. Can't get enough of those finger lickin' metaphors.

You remember I told you I didn't know either, **Jefepato**? Well, I still don't, but I hope you like it, too.


	6. Robin

**A/N - **425 hits and five reviews? A girl could get a complex about something like that.

* * *

**6. Robin**

* * *

Once upon a time there was a team called the Teen Titans. They had a brave and fearless leader who looked after them, and an alien princess who stood by his side to help. Then one day, when the two of them were away from home, the leader woke up and he wasn't the same, and the princess had to leave his side. She cried a lot, because she was very sad and missed him very much.

They still saw him, but he was not quite right anymore. He didn't say "Hello," or ask them how they were doing, or do anything he'd always done. He growled a bit, roared sometimes, and his clothes had stopped fitting properly. His mask stayed in place, though, so they could always recognise him when he came up to them in the street. Sometimes he brought his new friends with him, but they weren't as nice as he'd been. The new friends and the old friends didn't get on. Sometimes they argued. Many times they fought. The princess was always very upset when that happened, because it meant that the brave and fearless leader was going to go away again.

They let him go, time after time, because he was their friend.

They let her cry, time after time, until one day she finally ran out of tears and never cried again.

* * *

Speedy didn't like being leader. It was obvious. Still, he did it. He gave them orders and covered their backs and charged into battle alongside them. He planned raids and stacked up defences and saved lives just as well as any of them – perhaps better.

But it was obvious he didn't like doing it.

Raven hadn't put up an argument when Cyborg suggested Speedy take over. She could have. He'd even offered her the position, citing his continued lack of a recharge pack for his own refusal. She'd said no. Terra couldn't quite understand why, but she'd said it very firmly, and stood behind Cy when he took the matter to everyone else. Beast Boy and Terra didn't have the tactical know-how to make good leaders, and Starfire had said very little since Robin left, which left only one real choice.

Speedy accepted with a kind of weary concurrence, as if he'd predicted just this sort of thing, and prayed to every available deity that it wouldn't come down to it. He even went through the motions of shaking each of their hands in turn, and saying what an honour it was they thought him worthy.

When he came to Raven, Terra noted the tiny tightening of his grip before he shook. Raven slipped her hand back under her cloak without comment.

"Titans, go!"

The words were right, but the voice was all wrong.

* * *

"Robin!"

The Misshapen in the eye-mask snarled. He still looked humanoid – bipedal with opposable thumbs – but his snout had lengthened, and his ears were sharper now. He looked like something from a Hammer Horror flick, but with better make-up, and there was enough hair on him to power at least three Austin Powers movies.

Starfire had recognised him from far off, and bulleted right through what had once been Moll's Diner to get to him before he disappeared. Now they stood opposite each other, both aliens in different senses of the word.

The other Titans jogged and flew and geokinetically slid up, on the lookout for other creatures. Robin rarely hung out alone anymore, and his 'pals' were more than happy to rip his old friends a new one. Last time they'd nearly taken Terra's hand off at the wrist before BB gorillaed them aside.

"Please, Robin," Starfire pleaded, "do you not recognise me?"

It was a ridiculous question. No other Misshapen had retained even a semblance of old-self.

Still, this was _Robin_. Nobody, even those who'd only known him after things went bad, could bring themselves to just up and fire on the urban myth without at least _trying_ to help him first. There was always a first time for everything. Maybe they could still get through to him, make him come back to himself. They knew so very little about why people became Misshapens, or why it happened when it did. Cyborg had theories, but they were just _theories_…

Terra winced. She remembered Cy; so low on power he couldn't even leave the caves now. He was conserving energy, making a last ditch attempt to replicate his recharge system from some semi-mangled machinery Raven had brought in.

"Robin - " said Star, cutting across Terra's thoughts.

The Misshapen that had once been Robin crouched low and then lunged to one side. Terra, being the closest, was the target of his lunge. Without thinking, she responded by kicking upward, sending a flurry of grit into his face. He yelped when some got in his eyes, reaching for her blindly. His claws grazed her lower leg as she leapt backwards.

Speedy yelled something. Beast Boy got behind Robin, shifted to gorilla, and pinned his arms to his sides.

"Raven!" Starfire cried, pointing. "Use your powers to bring him back! Summon him back from that dark place to which he has departed!"

It was a ludicrous request. Terra half expected Raven to refuse. After all, she was an empath, not a true telepath – and it wasn't as if they had any evidence to suggest Misshapens were still human on the inside any more than they were on the outside.

She looked to Speedy, but he had his back to them and was firing at a trio of Misshapens heading for them from the opposite direction. "Incoming!" he yelled over the crack-hiss of a cryo-arrow being deployed.

Beast Boy bellowed against the claws digging at his gut from Robin's awkward position.

"Raven!" Starfire shrieked. There was something approaching terror in her voice – terror at losing this opportunity, terror at losing Robin again, terror at just _losing_. Life brought all sorts of new surprises, but it wasn't too hot on second chances.

Raven's cloak fanned out around her. Her eyes glowed white, like molten sunlight, and excess energy spilled down her cheeks like tears. It was the closest Terra had ever come to seeing her cry – or at least looking like she was crying. It was a horrible, fascinating sight, like seeing a tiger tap-dance in a hula skirt: it simply wasn't meant to happen.

Neither was Raven supposed to scream like that.

Terra didn't even think what she was doing. While the end of Raven's terrible screech rolled across the ground, she put on a burst of speed and caught the other girl before she hit the floor. Raven was breathing hard. Her hood had flopped back, and beads of sweat dribbled down her brow and temples. It wasn't possible for her to be any more ashen, but she suddenly looked very, very sick, and she was trembling like she had the mother of all chills.

Robin went stiff in Beast Boy's arms, and then flopped forward. Such was the abruptness of the movement that for a second it was easy to believe he was dead.

Terra barely noticed. "Raven? Ray, you okay?"

Raven shivered uncontrollably. Her eyes were wide – impossibly so – and was that Terra's imagination, or were those lines of red appearing on her forehead?

"Too much…" she mumbled. "Can't… Robin… too little left…"

No, not lines. Eyes. There were freakin' _eyes_ opening, right in her forehead.

Terra felt panic welling inside her. She'd heard stories about this happening before, sure, but she'd always assumed they were as much of the past as Titans Tower. Raven was composed. She was self-contained. She had such control of herself that to think she would ever _not_ was absurd. What Beast Boy and Cyborg said about magic mirrors and disjointed individuality and going into her head to find a demonic anger… it was all just so much fiction. It didn't match what she'd seen of Raven, the real Raven; the Raven who argued with Robin and Speedy behind closed doors, who refused leadership even though she was offered it, who wouldn't eat meat and read her books near the ceiling with that snotty look on her face.

The tap-dancing hula-skirted tiger was on fire.

"Raven! Snap out of it!"

Four slits. Two of them, the top two, cracked open. Pupil-less pits of red focussed on her. They sat in Raven's skin, on Raven's face, but what looked through them was not Raven. At least, not the Raven Terra knew.

Which, if she'd had time to think it, begged the question: how well did she actually know her?

"_Raven_!" Terra shook Raven as hard as she dared. Raven's neck was like a wet piece of noodle.

She could hear BB bellowing in pain. Starfire was yelling something, but it was muffled by the incessant noises from Speedy's end of the fight. Bedlam percolated around them, but Terra was struck by the conviction that she couldn't let go, couldn't get up and go help the others until she'd first helped Raven. If the stories BB and Cy had told her were true, then it was imperative Raven go back to normal or they were all finished. You couldn't help anyone if you were dead.

But how did you help when you didn't understand what was going on? BB and Cy were inside her head when they helped her. Terra was on the outside, and there was no handy magic mirror for her to use. In her mind, this translated roughly to 'scream very loud and maybe that'll get through to her'. "_Ra-ven_!" she shouted, punctuating each syllable with a hard shake. "Fight it, Raven. Don't do this!"

The upper two eyes were wide. Thin curls of mist crept into the normal eyeballs, staining them red. Terra felt Raven stiffen in her arms, and then a tugging sensation, as if something were trying to lift her into the air. Gritting her teeth, she summoned manacles of earth to tie both of them down. Earth was her element. In the air she'd be at a disadvantage.

"Oh no you don't. We're staying right here until you come the hell down and start being normal-style-weird again."

In another life she might have laughed: her, the one whose greatest strength was smashing stuff, trying to talk down the ice queen.

"Ray! Raven!"

The middle pair of eyes snapped open, and a burst of black energy erupted around the two girls in a funnel. It buffeted against Terra, trying to pluck her loose, shifting around to place her in the eye of the growing tempest. Instinctively, Terra held tighter. Coils of air and black energy swirled around her ankles, prying at the manacles, slapping at her bare skin and streaming into her ears and mouth and nose. The darkness touched her. It consumed her. It _invaded _her.

And she screamed.

She hurtled forward, not propelled from behind but dragged, suddenly and painfully, into a black abyss. It was so disconcerting that she felt as though her face had been torn off and thrown ahead of the rest of her, leaving her body far behind on the fringes of some dark chasm. She had the feeling that it, too, was shooting forward, but at a much slower pace. All that sluggish, heavy flesh; the weight all that blood and bone added to the image she held of herself.

What was she?

Mind and heart and soul.

Memories.

Face.

Eyes and ears and mouth.

Words.

­_Help…_

White whirlpools interrupted the endless black, flashing past like single frames from a strip of film. A handful of stars scraped her field of vision. A thick, malevolent shadow pulsed in the darkest reaches of the void.

Terra didn't understand what was happening. She didn't have time to try, either. She felt her mind slipping away, could feel herself beginning to shut down. There was no up, no down, nothing but this everlasting gloom. She was falling, but not falling down, just … falling. It was soft and warm and comforting, in a morbid sort of way. She was lulled into a kind of hibernation as she was drawn… and drawn… and drawn… aware, yet unresponsive to her surroundings. They bled into her, smudging the boundaries between self and not self, allowing one to cross over into the other and mingle. Boundaries, restrictions, limitations – they were familiar to this place, and yet… and yet… so unwelcome. _Over _familiar. Unwanted.

What was she?

Who cared?

Mind and heart and soul.

Nothingness.

Memories.

Worthless.

Face.

Irrelevant.

Eyes and ears and mouth.

Darkness.

Words.

Silence.

_Help me…_

Then suddenly, a sense that the void was not totally empty, the dark not so impenetrable, the solitude not so absolute. Somewhere ahead was a barrier - a wall - and in front of it was a presence: a ball of thought and feeling that fizzed and effervesced like a lidded pot left too long to simmer. She careered uncontrollably towards it, bound for collision. Though she was all but blind now she could still feel it, could perceive its proximity as she was whipped along. There was no doubt about it. She was going to hit. And on the other side of that wall… what then?

Self and not self and everything in between didn't know.

Didn't care.

Meaningless.

And then – impact.

Cushioning.

Her outline snapped back into focus as self was forcibly reasserted. Something shoved it back into place. Her and the dark – separate again. That same something pushed them still further apart, pulling and tugging and heaving her backwards along the path she'd just taken. She was still blind, but the presence bolstered her, kept her inside her own boundaries.

The wall was still whole.

The pulsing shadow faded.

The stars swept past.

The whirlpools snatched at her, but she sped on.

A sense of nearness again, of the oblivion's end. Or maybe its beginning.

A pair of hands pressed either side of her skull.

Her skull…

Terra fell back into her own head with such force that, had she not already been on the ground, she might have fallen over. Gravel pressed into her cheek. There was dust in her eyes and up her nose. She confirmed she was really back in herself when she had to sneeze and blink, and her nose replied by warning her it was just sore enough to jump off her face if she did that again.

"…rra?" asked a muffled voice.

"Hm?"

Someone was helping her to sit upright. Her stomach gurgled in protest, and she lay back down again before she threw up.

"Gfwuh," she managed when she could speak with semi-decent coherence. "Mrrf… anyone get the license plate of that dream sequence?"

Someone stroked her forehead. She was lying on her side, one palm flat against the ground. Very carefully she rolled over and concentrated on the owner of that stroking hand.

Beast Boy looked down at her with eyes full of concern, relief and bewilderment – in that order. She reckoned she was experiencing pretty much that same gamut right now, just with extra retching. She tried a smile.

"So… did we win?"

Beast Boy exhaled. "You," he said solemnly, "are so incredibly lucky, it's not even funny." He gestured behind him, and for the first time Terra noticed an unconscious Raven. She had her eyes closed, head in Starfire's lap, breath rasping through slightly parted lips. "Raven's shadows are, like, mega bad news. When she went all out of control, one of them ate you – frikkin' _ate_ you, Terra. Like, right up. One big chomp and it was like some sort of Terra-shaped shadow where you should've been."

Terra nodded and then regretted it. Yeah, that would account for the freaky-deaky nightmare thing. Although, if quizzed, she probably would have suggested hallucinatory drugs before man-eating shadows.

"But… wow. Man. I mean just… man. Wow."

"Huh?"

Beast Boy paused, then bent down and pecked her on the forehead, as if to verify she was really there. "Raven went even more psycho after you got eaten. Like, there are different levels of psycho we didn't even know about, and she switched from one to another and totally flipped out. Jumped into the shadow - right _into _it – and next thing we know, there's some sort of explosion and you're both lying on the floor looking all dead and stuff." His voice was strange. He sounded like Goofball Garfield Logan trying to do an impression of Beast Boy and failing. He shook his head. "But you're alive, which is great. Better than great – it's mondolicious. But… I mean… crap. I mean – how you feeling?"

"Not exactly double-dip, Rocky Road, end-of-the-sale frenzy. But close." Her smile was lopsided and wan, but it was a smile. "I know my arms and legs are still mine. They hurt too much not to be. And my head's about to split apart and spew lava, but hey, still on my shoulders, right?"

"Right."

Her toenails and fingernails ached. Her teeth pinged. The roots of her hair felt alive and prickly, as though charged with static electricity. Even her eyelashes seemed to sizzle.

"Did… where's Speedy? Are the Misshapens…? Did Robin…?" She left the questions hanging, but Beast Boy's expression told her all she needed to know. "Oh, hell on a stick."

"That's one way of putting it. We nailed one of the other Misshapens before it took Speedy out – sitting on his chest with his head in its mouth, no less. His bow needs some repairs, though. The others escaped. Rob's out cold. Tried to take a chunk out of me in all the excitement. Speedy's got him on lockdown, but unless we find a way to hold him without hurting him, we're back to square one."

Terra peered at an awkward angle, reaching up a hand to hover above the sticky dark stains streaking his costume from the shoulder. There was a hole there, deep and ragged at the edges. "Oh, BB…"

"Hey, it's just a scratch."

"Yeah, and I'm the Queen of Sheba."

"Um, ixnay on the oyaltyray entioningmay. Arfiresay, ememberray?"

"Hitsay. Ightray." Terra blinked. "Although, I think she's got other things on her mind right now…"

Starfire's expression was non-existent. Her face was a complete blank. And for her, that was very unusual, and potentially very bad indeed. She tended to Raven, but kept looking to where Terra could only assume Speedy and Robin were.

Terra's head felt light. She closed her eyes, not caring that they were in the middle of a war zone and pretty much all their big hitters were impaired. "We've got to figure something out," she mumbled. "Before he wakes up."_ If he gets away again, he could hurt people, _she thought. Or maybe she'd said it aloud. She wasn't certain. She really was very tired…

She thought Beast Boy answered, but she couldn't be sure it wasn't her imagination heralding her back into oblivion.

* * *

There was a general consensus that however bad things were yesterday, they were better than today. What they were like two days ago was even better than yesterday. The farther you went back, the more beautiful and desirable the world became, until you crashed through the barrier of Before They Came. The world back then hadn't been a paradise, but now it took on the spectre of one.

You dragged yourself from sleep each morning to face something that was always worse than the day before, but by remembering the world that existed before you went to sleep, you could delude yourself into thinking that the present day was just an apparition, no more or less than the memories of all the other days you carried inside you. Tomorrow you would love today. It worked for some people, less so for others, but there was a feeling amongst all that the future was potentially a very dark place.

Terra woke up in the caves, rubbing at her head and tasting crud in her mouth. Her entire head was wet with perspiration, but that was to be expected. Loss of self in the terrifying dreamscape of another person was bound to cause a few nightmares.

She wobbled out for a drink, met Speedy, and wished they had another bottle of Famous Grouse.

Robin had got away again.

Starfire and BB were with Cyborg.

Raven was still unconscious.

He told her the news in that order, as she stood against the wall sipping at a canteen of water made pure by Cy's distilling device. When he was done she took it from her lips and stared at it until he became uncomfortable. He didn't show it, naturally, but the air thickened a little.

"I wish the monsters would go back under the bed," she said softly.

Speedy went quiet – which is a ridiculous thing to say until you experience quiet and _quiet_. Only he could have understood that reference. "I - I … I wish the bay were filled with strawberry cordial," he replied.

"I wish lollipops grew on trees."

"I wish unicorns were real."

"I wish I could fly away and live in the clouds with the Care Bears."

"I wish the grass would grow purple, and leaves were made of solid gold."

She leaned her head on his shoulder and sighed. "I wish…"

* * *

Raven's personal area was disturbingly familiar. Stalactites played peek-a-boo on the ceiling. Terra crouched near the doorway, examining the place without really wanting to. There were the three books next to the hand-mirror, and right there were the two ceramic spheres. The black throw had been tossed over the sleeping figure on the cot, and was wrapped tightly around her. Raven seemed impossibly small in the airy space.

She stirred slightly. Terra froze, muscles cramping in their odd position. Raven mumbled, cracking open an eye that took half a second to spot her in the gloom.

"How long have you been here?"

"An hour." Terra shrugged. "Or four. How you feeling?"

"I'm alive."

"That's a very cynical way of being positive."

Raven grunted, sat up and winced, pressing the heel of one hand against her left eye. She didn't have her cloak on, and when the throw pooled at her waist Terra was struck by how tiny she actually was. She blinked, wondering how she could not have noticed that before. This time it was no visual trickery created by a large empty space, but a compelling realisation.

Really, it was quite remarkable, but in that unguarded moment Raven seemed undeniably tiny, as though a stiff breeze could blow her right on her butt. The slightly wasted muscles were to be expected, but that cape had a lot to answer for; the smallness hidden beneath it suggesting something not yet completed – something that needed protecting.

Raven looked up at her. Terra felt an odd tingle at the back of her head. A temptation blossomed to visualise something really obscene with a strong side of _Read this_, but she refrained.

Or at least, she thought she'd refrained. The strange look Raven gave her made her think she maybe hadn't been quick enough.

She coughed, diffusing the moment. "So… you're awake."

"Your powers of deduction are astounding." Raven swung her legs over the side of the cot and got stiffly to her feet. She wobbled a little. On instinct Terra twitched to catch her, but she stayed upright and began poking around her things.

"Are you … okay?"

"I still possess all my faculties, and I can think clearly enough to know that there's no lasting damage in my cerebral cortex."

"Oh. But how about, y'know, physical injuries and stuff."

"You mean do I have any, or are they serious?"

"So you _do_ have some."

"No."

"You can heal yourself that fast?"

Raven said nothing. The silence was stifling. The air in the smaller caves was often muggy and dank, but this was a different sort of oppressive. It made Terra think of suffocating under the bedclothes so the monsters wouldn't see you.

She shifted her feet. "I… Raven…"

"Yes?"

"Is it always like that?"

"Like what?"

"In… where I went. Is it always like that in there?" She couldn't bring herself to say 'in your head'. While she could think it, giving it verbal form sounded just too weird, even for her.

Raven paused, hand flush against one of her books. "You remember that place?"

"Of course I remember it. Kinda hard to forget, y'know, being eaten by a shadow monster."

"Is that what you think happened?"

"That's what BB told me happened."

"Oh. I see."

"Why? Isn't that right?"

"It's a fair assumption."

"Excuse me?"

"Given the visual display, I suppose it's easy to see why he would think that."

"You make it sound like he added two plus two and got three."

Raven said nothing for a long moment. She picked up her book and flipped through the first few pages, scanned a few lines of text, then slammed it shut loud enough to make Terra jump. In her awkward position, it had the adverse consequence that she then fell on her butt.

"Ow! I already had a bruised tush. That's why I wasn't sitting on it."

"I hope you didn't come here expecting me to heal that."

She blushed.

Raven sighed and said quietly, "It's not always like that."

"Really?" Man, was that note in her voice really there? Terra hoped she sounded positive rather than just pathetic.

"Sometimes it gets better. Sometimes it gets worse. Same as everyone. Same as you."

_Same as me. Yeah, right. Except I don't have soul-sucking monsters living in my head._ She instantly chastised herself for such a cruel thought.

Raven appeared not to notice. She just looked at the book in her hands, ran her fingers along the edges and in between the pages. Her eyes were difficult to look at – huge and bleak and obvious, even in the gloom.

"You pulled me out, didn't you?" Terra swallowed. "You pulled me out before I got… too far in."

She nodded.

"What would've happened if… y'know."

"In all honesty? I'm not really sure."

"Nothing good?"

"That goes without saying."

"Oh. Well." Terra got to her feet and brushed herself off. The empty canteen dangled from her wrist. "Right. I'll be… I'll just fuck off, then."

She was half a dozen steps away when Raven called out, "Wait."

Terra turned, all her weight balanced on one foot. "Yu-huh?"

"What did you see?"

"What, in there?" She tapped the side of her skull. "You're the psychic-whatsit. You tell me."

Raven frowned.

Terra wondered at the fact that this was the most civilised conversation they'd ever had. She raised her hands, patting the air up and down in a gesture of truce. "Okay, okay. Um, not much that I can remember. A big dark tunnel, possibly experiencing a budget cut for electricity, because the light at the end was out."

Raven didn't smile. Yet somehow, it didn't take the wind out of Terra's sails as much as it might once have done. She was getting used to responses through non-response.

"That all?"

"No, I… yes. That's all." Raven turned around and walked back into her personal area.

Terra watched her retreating form until the shadows swallowed it and even her outline was lost.

* * *

"I couldn't do anything," Raven told Starfire evenly. "It wasn't a case of he's too far absorbed in his own psyche. There's nothing of him _left_. His mind's been wiped clean and _replaced_. Re. Placed."

Terra sat next to BB and wished her head didn't pound so much. He shot her a sidelong look and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. It didn't help, but it was a nice gesture.

Starfire's hands curled into fists. Her elbows locked by her sides. "I do not believe you."

"Believe what you want. It won't make any difference."

"How can you articulate that? Robin is your friend. How can you abandon him?"

"You think this is any easier for me to accept?"

"I think that your previous misfortune is hindering your judgment. I think you do not wish to try again because you are afraid to but you do not wish to admit it. That is what I think."

They faced each other, seemingly oblivious there was anyone else in the room, despite the bleeping from Cyborg's remaining backup systems. He was running completely on auxiliary power now, and even that was so low he couldn't move anything below his neckline. He was a cripple all over again, a man-boy nearer death than not.

Still, he had enough energy to ask, "When y'all say wiped clan, Raven, do you mean…?"

"I mean there's nothing left of the Robin we knew inside that body. It's… it's like he was a host for some parasite that's now displaced him. Where to, I couldn't say. But he's not in there. When I tried going deeper into the new mind to look for him, I all but destroyed it because the mental structure is so radically different to human. My techniques just bounce off or choke on themselves. I doubt any human intellect without strong psychic abilities could even _survive _in that environment."

"So you're saying Robin's dead?"

"I'm saying I don't know. What I _do_ know is that the Misshapen we keep meeting isn't him. He's gone, and that's the best I can tell you."

Starfire's fists clenched so hard her knuckles cracked. Terra watched her warily, not sure if she'd need to call up a shield of earth as protection. She hoped not. Her head hurt and it was too much to process, this new side of Starfire. Star was famous for being soft, but sometimes, when Terra looked at her these days, it seemed like softness was just a word in the dictionary. She looked like something that could snap with sufficient pressure – like something that maybe _wanted_ to snap. It was both a saddening and a terrifying notion.

Raven bowed her head, hair flopping in front of her face, shielding her expression. "I'm sorry. But that's the way it is." There was a time Terra would have thought her incapable of apologising, but the situation was too sombre to make note of it.

Starfire stared at her for a long moment. Then she turned away. "I am going on patrol."

"Do you want me to go with - " Speedy started.

"Thank you, but no. I will be fine. Excuse me."

* * *

_To Be Continued…._

* * *

And now time for some **Review Replies**!

Eep. I guess this chapter didn't do much to lighten the depressing mood, did it, **Raven's Girlfriend**? Hope the Raven-Terra interactions mean you'll keep with us despite it.

What indeed, **Jefepato?** I've grown quite attached to you.

**Cheesy Monkey**! I have the strong urge to clutch you to myself and hug the stuffing from you, but I'll refrain and sprinkle sparkles of yayness over you instead. Feel the yayness at your presence!

Indeed I have, **Howie**. _Gateway to the Gods_, to be specific. It's listed in the very first chapter. Credit where credit is due. That passage was just so very Robin, though, that I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it than Applegate's.

And I like that you like my take on the TT universe, **Jose Reynaldo**. Was this chapter twisty enough for you?


	7. Weight of the World

* * *

**7. Weight of the World**

* * *

In Jump City it was best to trust only what your eyes told you. People told lies in case you wanted something from them. They told you what they thought you wanted to hear and kept a few pretties on display, hanging off their belts or whatever, in the hope you'd just take that and leave their pockets and underwear alone. To look at them closely was to see the fear in their eyes contrasting the smiles on their lips.

But you had to be careful about what you saw, too, because there were so many things in Jump that defied understanding.

Three days after the Titans let Robin get away, Terra stood on top of the old McDonalds sign, that huge yellow M you used to be able to see from the freeway when there were still cars around. She could see a multicoloured spot on the horizon and knew that it was a chaos vent, and she had to resist the urge to dismiss it just because it was far away. There was so much they didn't understand about those things. Against the clear and present dangers of Misshapens and starvation, it was all too easy to close the eyes to more imprecise threats. You couldn't predict a chaos vent. At least Misshapens acted on hunger, and their impulses were relatively simple to define.

Whatever you saw in Jump had the potential to wound you, as if by laying eyes on something it had the power to take away part of what made you … well, _you_. After the Observatory, sometimes Terra had the indescribable feeling that it was dangerous to look. She had the urge to avert her eyes from things, to shut them out, but that was dangerous in a whole other way because then you got confused. You forgot what you'd seen and hadn't seen, what you'd come across in the street and what you'd fabricated enough to make you wake up screaming. You became unsure of what you were really looking at, whether it was the same as what you _thought _you were looking at, and whether what you thought you were looking at was actually, physically there at all.

It was … complicated.

She didn't know if the others felt the same way. She didn't like to ask them.

Speedy, the only other person who'd been there, rarely mentioned the Observatory.

BB didn't understand because he hadn't seen and heard and met those kids.

Starfire didn't talk much anymore. She never smiled or laughed. It was a wonder she could muster enough joy to fly, but Terra supposed the idea of flying just to get into the sky, to get away from all this, was enough to spark some degree of happiness. Or if not happiness, then at least comfort.

As for the others … it was stupid, but she was embarrassed.

It wasn't enough for her to say _I'm looking at that thing_, because it was one thing to do that when the thing was a paperclip or a CD, but when the thing you were looking at was a dead child, a little girl lying in the street with no clothes on, her head smashed in and all covered with blood … well then, what did you say to that? It wasn't a simple matter to plainly tell yourself _I'm looking at a dead child_. Terra's mind balked at forming the words. She'd start, but the thought would change into something else. _I'm looking at a dead dog. I'm looking at a box of spilled noodles. I'm looking at a Barbie doll in a red dress. _She'd started finding it difficult to separate the things she saw from herself. Some part of her imagined that it was she, or someone she knew, lying there in the filth, and that was too horrible a notion to entertain anymore. So she didn't.

She wondered if she was going mad. Then she wondered if compassion was a form of madness.

* * *

"So who are you, anyway?"

Speedy kept up the tension in his bowstring, arrow trained on the scruffy guy of indeterminate age. The guy kept his hands up, one of which held what could have either been a wrench or a laser gun under all the add-ons. It looked impressive, which was more than could be said for him. He looked like he was about to soil himself.

Terra supposed she would, too, were she confronted by four superpowered teenagers in a dark alley. Especially if two of them were had energy bolts levelled at her chest, and one was a famous sureshot. She could have completed the set by hovering a big rock above his head, but there was something about him that made her feel slightly sick at the prospect.

His eyes were small, but not hard, instead courting something like dewy-eyed lunacy without truly falling into it. He'd been snooping around where a known family sheltered, so they'd confronted him and had him point that … thing at them in return. Which brought them up to the present moment.

"Who am I?" he echoed, and blinked like he really wanted to know the answer to the question. "Who am I? Hm. Good one. Sure. Real good. Yup."

"Would you please get on with it? Who are you and what are you doing here?"

"Oh, yeah, right. Looking for spare parts. Gotta have spare parts. Can make anything out of junk. Junk-man, that's me. But that ain't my name. Name, name, who's got the name? Think I had one. Must've mislaid it. Always doing that. Not enough room, y'see. Not enough space to keep things in, so they get lost. The boss clutters up the shop, but he won't be moved. Nope. Nu-uh. Too set in his ways. Huh, maybe he could tell you my name. The boss knows a lot of important stuff."

Speedy and Raven exchanged a look. It wasn't the first time they'd confronted someone whose mind was on the verge of snapping. None of them wanted to be the reason these people went over the edge, so Speedy chose his words carefully. "And who's your boss?"

"Yeah, the boss, great guy. World champion, y'know. Top title ten years running. Uh-huh. 'Course, he needs me to keep him on form, but only for the buff-up. Can't teach him nuthin'. Nope. But I'm lucky to be working for him. I am. He calls me Mechanic. Hey – there! A name. Pleased to meet you, I'm Mechanic."

"Right. Uh, Mechanic, who _is_ your boss?"

"Like to meet him?" The scruffy guy, now christened 'Mechanic', beckoned and grinned. The change in his face was dramatic. "Like I said, he stays in the shop. Too big to move, y'see. Not since he did the cease and desist thing. I erased all the viruses, but he ain't been the same since. Don't throw barrels at me no more, which is nice, but I kinda miss the ol' banter thing we had going for a while."

After a short conferral, they agreed to follow him so long as no dangers presented themselves. Nobody wanted to go back to the caves yet. Not with Cyborg the way he was. This provided a neat distraction and might possibly prove useful. Fortunate things often came from odd sources.

It was a distraction that had automatic lasers covering its doors. Mechanic turned them off with a small remote control hidden under his hat, then turned and flashed them another used-car-salesman grin. "Solar power," he explained. "Figured I might as well make use of the panels. Come on in, but wipe your feet, please. The boss don't like no mess in the shop."

"It safe?" Speedy asked when he'd gone a few steps.

"Safe as safe can be," Mechanic replied.

"I sense sincerity," Raven said, sotto voice. "But that doesn't necessarily mean anything with a fractured mindset."

Speedy nocked an arrow. "Right. Everyone, be on your guard."

Mechanic led them down a staircase that screamed 'danger' so much that Starfire's fists glowed every inch of the way. Raven's eyes remained white until they neared the end, when she grabbed Speedy's shoulder and stage-whispered, "I don't sense any other minds down here. At all."

Terra wondered what that could mean.

They got their answer soon enough.

"Whoa."

Speedy couldn't help himself. It was every little boy's wet dream – a giant red, yellow and black-chrome robot, sat in a custom-made armchair of metal piping and foam. Its eyelets were blank, its many joints starting to rust a little in the hard-to-reach spots, but otherwise it had been lovingly preserved. It was nine feet tall at least – maybe even twelve. The proportions were difficult to make out while it was sitting down.

"Meet the boss," Mechanic said proudly. He patted the robot's knee and winked at them. "Top of his game. World champion. Well, until he got that super-virus, but he don't like me to talk about that too much. Ain't that right, boss?"

The robot remained resolutely silent.

"He'd work perfectly, if his brains weren't so scrambled. I kept his power cells online in case he ever got around to unscrambling himself someday. Great guy, the boss, but a terrible procrastinator."

The four Titans froze and all latched onto the same word.

"Did you just say 'power cell'?" asked Speedy.

"Sure did. Self-propagating system based around some old ideas I threw together in college. Much better than the battery pack thing he used to run on. Always needed recharging. Yup. So one day I says to him, I says, 'Boss, you gotta get with the times, man. Don't nobody work with that outdated crap no more.' He didn't believe me, of course. Great boss, but a bit of a smart aleck. Thought he knew why the sky was blue, nameen? So after the super-virus, I thought, 'I'm 'a modernise this system from the ground up. Keep the exoskeleton, but everything else – fwoosh. Out with the old and in with the new, I says. And when the boss gets unscrambled, I got a feeling he'll agree with me. Yup."

"Could you make more of those cells?"

Mechanic stroked his chin. "A customer, eh? Why didn't you say so, bub? If I had the right tools and equipment, I could maybe knock one together. Take me a while to grub up the stuff, though. So … how's three months Thursday sound?"

Terra's heart dropped. Cyborg had maybe three _hours_.

"What about the cell inside that thing?" Raven indicated to the dead robot.

"You kidding? The boss'd moirderlise me if he woke up and found I'd sold his power supply."

"But could it be removed and set up elsewhere?"

"Nu-uh. Wired too tight to his schematics. The whole idea for self-propagation was for it to work within the boss's particular parameters. Uh-huh. It's all his. He's the only dude who can use it. Very user-specific. Only him. Yup."

Raven looked thoughtful. "You say his mind was destroyed by this 'super-virus' - "

"Virus by the name of TTX-8996-F-G/T-0.776, to be precise."

"Right. Which means his CPU is shot, right?"

"The boss can handle anything, sweetcakes. S'why he's world champ. Like I said, he's just a bit scrambled. That's all."

"Okay. But theoretically, would it be possible to upload a new personality programme into his blank CPU?"

"Theoretically?" Mechanic twitched his head from side to side in a nervous habit. "Theoretically, sure, if the programme was compatible with his hardware. But I don't see that happening. The boss is one of a kind. Numero uno. They never made no more like him. You'd have to get with the artificial intelligence and write a whole personality programme from scratch before you could even think about adapting it to his systems. Big job. Heavy workload. Especially with no gear. No files. A.I. ain't easy. No sir. Government stuff. Very hush-hush. Drive a guy cuckoo after a while. Writing codes in dirt with a twig. Yu-huh. Twigs. Gotta get me a pencil one of these days. Yup."

"We don't need to write a programme," Raven answered. "We have one pre-written, but it needs a new home."

"And you wanna put it in the boss? No way, José. Nope. I took care of the boss all this time so's he'd be good to go when he comes back. Tiptop. First-class. Aces, nameen? His body ain't for sale. Not at any price. Nu-uh." He shook his head with such vehemence it might have fallen off his shoulders.

Terra knew it had to be done. Cyborg's life depended on it. But still, while Speedy and Starfire threatened Mechanic into submission, and Raven made contact with BB, she could taste bile in the back of her throat. And it stayed all the way through getting Cy to the 'shop' and convincing a gibbering Mechanic that his beloved boss wasn't coming back from being offline. Ever.

"'Couse he's coming back. He's the boss. Hard as nails. Tough as old boots. He'll be fine. Gotta work hard. Gotta be ready for him. Returning hero, right? Fanfare, tickertape parade – the works. Yeah."

Eventually Raven had to take his head in her hands and _force_ some understanding into him. It was quick and dirty, and his heartbreaking wail would stay with Terra for the rest of her life, but it needed to be done. Cy's life was at stake. What were one man's hopes and dreams and plans against that? And so what if they had to be less than heroic in getting his cooperation? It needed to be done. It _needed_ to.

She kept her eyes averted while they pried open the robot's chestplate and brought out a multitude of coloured wires that had no business being so bright and shiny. Mechanic had a set of tools he'd built himself, all charged up by the solar panelling on the roof. He worked with tears on his face, struggling valiantly to save someone he'd never met before. Starfire kept a starbolt trained on his back, her expression unreadable, but it was needless. Raven had done her job well.

"You sure we can trust this guy?" Beast Boy asked nervously.

"You got a better idea?" Speedy shot back.

He didn't, of course. There was no time for CVs and rigorous interviewing. If this went wrong, Cy was a goner. If they did nothing, Cy was a goner. Win-win or lose-lose.

Raven had retreated under her hood and shut her eyes. She looked like nothing so much as a female grim reaper, huddled in the corner. Feeling slightly useless, Terra left the others and went over to her.

"You okay?"

"Am I your new pet project, that you have to keep asking me that?"

"Guess I'm just a concerned party. You cool?"

Raven cracked an eye open. "Have you ever heard of an emotion vortex?"

"Uh, no."

"Spiritual nimbus?"

"No."

"Do you know anything about temporal mechanics?"

"No."

"Then I can't explain exactly why I'm less than cool at present."

"Oh." Terra shoved her hands in her pockets. "Can you at least try?"

"No."

"Just a little?"

"You're asking me to explain the finer details of extrasensory output?"

"Um … yeah?"

"Go away, Terra. I'm not a side-show exhibit, and I'm not here just to answer your questions."

"Well, when you put it like that…" Terra pushed hair from her eyes. "I just asked if you were _okay_. It's not a big _deal. _Geez. Look, I know you were absent the day they taught Small Talk 101, but can't you at least pretend to make an effort?"

Raven let out a long breath and shut both eyes again. "Mechanic is hyper-emotional. When I connected with him, I formed a bond like … imagine a piece of thread. Each time I connect with a person's mind, I attach a piece of thread from me to them. That connecting thread is called a spiritual nimbus. It may get thinner, but it never really breaks. The more powerful the connection, the stronger the thread. The more emotion that person is feeling, the more pronounced the thread becomes in my consciousness. In addition to connecting with Mechanic just now, I've connected with each and every Titan at some point. All those threads are now in the same room, and the people they're attached to are hyper-emotional. That emotion travels down the strengthened threads and feeds directly into me. At the same time. That's the basis of an emotional vortex."

"Oh." Terra couldn't think what to say. She licked her lips and scuffed her feet. "Do … am I thinking too loud?"

"That's not quite the way it works."

"Can I do anything to help?"

"An empathic purge might not go amiss."

"Excuse me, but I think you actually cracked a joke just then. A bad joke, sure, but a joke."

Raven opened both eyes. "I don't joke," she said flatly.

Terra was about to counter that with a 'you _so _do', just to irritate her, when a shout went up from behind them. She spun around to see Mechanic holding two sparking conduits together, face turned aside to prevent any falling on his skin. A multitude of nodes connected Cyborg's once-vibrantly blue body to a crude switchboard in the chestplate. He blinked once, twice, and then shut his organic eye. Seconds later the diode went out in his artificial one.

The word 'flatline' popped into Terra's head.

"We're losing him!" Speedy barked, not so much George Clooney as NoahWyle fifteen years ago. "Mechanic!"

"Dude!" Beast Boy said shrilly, of nobody in particular. He looked about as useless as Terra felt, stepping this way and that, looking to the others for guidance and support. The friendship between he and Cyborg was long and entwined, the kind that stretched so far into the past it seemed to have had no beginning. It just was.

It almost just _wasn't_…

Raven's eyes were shut again. Terra marched over and pulled BB out of the way, yanking so hard on his arm that part of her fretted she might dislocate it. He replied by turning huge eyes on her and moving his mouth like a beached fish.

"Connect the red wire. The red wire!" Mechanic called to Starfire. "You colour blind, girlie?"

"Here." Speedy snatched the wire and shoved it into the required socket.

"Now flip that switch."

"This one?"

"Yup-yup. I'll get this toggle. Hands together, eyes closed boys and girls. It's prayin' time."

There was a fizz and a shower of sparks from the robot's chest. Cyborg's body convulsed, causing Beast Boy to jump forward. Terra latched onto his shoulders and used her weight to drag him down with her into a huddle on the floor. She hoped he didn't shift to something bigger. This was an easily squashable position. And was there really meant to be that much smouldering?

Cyborg convulsed again. Mechanic tapped wildly at a panel of buttons inside the robot's head. He stood on one stupidly skinny – how was that supposed to hold the body up? – metal thigh to reach. When light suddenly shot out of the eyelets, it blinded him and he lost his footing. He fell with a cry, and would have smashed his head on the floor had a hand of black energy not caught him.

Terra looked at where Raven was mumbling something. She couldn't see any eyes, no flash of teeth or tongue, but she could _feel_ the words scraping along her skin like a razor. Not really thinking about it, she mouthed them in tandem, as if it would help.

_Azarath. Metrion. Zinthos. Azarath. Metrion. Zinthos. Azarath. Metrion. Zinthos._

The light pouring from the robot's eyelets created a canopy of radiance nobody could look at. They all shielded their faces – even Starfire – and waited with bated breath as the whirring and clicking and buzzing reached a crescendo.

_Azarath. Metrion. Zinthos. Azarath. Metrion. Zinthos…_

* * *

**A/N –** Title a reference to the Greek legend of Atlas, who supported the world on his shoulders (although he was briefly relieved by Heracles in exchange for fetching some golden apples). Review Replies are henceforth moved to my livejournal (I'm known over there as 'obabscribbler'). 


	8. Mechanic

* * *

**8: Mechanic**

* * *

It was strange. The movements and inflection were Cyborg, but the voice and body were not.

"How're you holding up, big guy?"

He looked down, feet planted an even distance apart to prevent him from falling over. That had already happened half a dozen times. He was still learning his centre of balance. "Okay, I guess. A few phantom pains. My brain keeps insisting I should have more nerve endings than I do. It feels weird to see you like this, though. You always been such a pipsqueak?"

Terra grinned despite herself and tried to ignore the mention of phantom pains. "Watch who you're calling a pipsqueak. I can still kick your butt."

"Oh really?" Again, it was Cyborg's smirk, but the mouth that made it wasn't his. There was a feeling of duality to everything he did now, and she got the impression that it might last a while.

But he was alive and coherent, which were the main things.

"Yeah, really." She raised her fists and threw a few shadow punches. "C'mon. I can take you."

Wobbling only slightly, he bent at the hips and wrapped a too-big hand around her waist, picking her up effortlessly and so fast her stomach took a moment to catch up. She could feel the faint shift in his fingers as they compensated for this new load, though it was surprisingly gentle against her. She _should_ have felt more worried they could accidentally crush her. She _should. _He hadn't got full control yet. He was still trying on this new skin. But… but.

But.

"Uh, best two out of three?"

"Now there's something I'd pay ticket-money for." Beast Boy wandered in munching an NRG bar.

Terra swivelled as best she could, but ended up peering uncomfortably over her shoulder at him. Mechanic's 'shop' was only the front of his operation. Below it was a sprawling complex of rooms and corridors with the taste of military in the air. Old style military, though. One of those bomb shelters built in the sixties that were replaced by high-tech alternatives when the Star Wars programme kicked in. Government reports – those that acknowledged their existence – promised they'd all been filled in with concrete and whatnot. For once, Terra was glad of America's cost-cutting culture.

She tried not to think how many people could have been saved had they known about this place before.

They'd been put in a large-ish room, long disused and covered in cobwebs. She'd all but coughed up a lung breathing them in, but Cyborg's new body didn't even wheeze. Truth be told, he seemed a little disappointed by that, but she couldn't be sure. Raven, Speedy and Starfire were still conferring on the upper level.

"Yo, BB. Where'd you get that?"

"Mechanic gave it to me. He's got, like, a whole _barn _full of food here. All freeze-dried and just-add-water stuff. I think before… y'know. I think he was some sort of Nostradamus freak. Storing stuff away to survive the Big One."

"Um, hello? Big One kinda already came and went."

"Maybe he was the smart one all the ti-i-i-i-iiiiiiiii…"

"Cy?" Terra looked to where his jaw hung a little loose at the hinges.

He reached up with his free arm and clanked it shut. Then he rocked his head from side to side as if getting a kink out of his neck. Which was ridiculous, because he was all nuts and bolts now, and nuts and bolts didn't _get_ kinks. "Sorry. Vocal loop. Still getting used to the systems in here. But I think I got it now." His eyes ticked from side to side with such rapidity they might have been part of a computer game. When they stopped, they hit the jackpot. "I think."

"Dude." Beast Boy looked at the half-eaten NRG bar, then offered it up. "Hey, y'wanna try some?"

Cyborg bent at the hips again and plucked the bar from his hand. It looked small and pathetic in his massive fingers. Both Beast Boy and Terra watched as he took a bite, chewed, and then spat it out again.

"Uh, ew?" BB wiped pulp from the top of his head.

"Sorry," Cyborg apologised, giving the unfinished bar back to him. "No taste buds. And I just got a heedful of data telling me I was ingesting foreign matter that should be purged immediately. So it was either spit it out or try to swallow and - "

"We get the picture," Terra cut in. "But still, ew. That's a totally disgusting habit."

"Hey, I didn't exactly have a tissue."

She blinked, suddenly struck by a memory so lucid and fierce it almost took her breath away. She could feel it in her molars, could actually _smell _her mother's perfume, and hear her accented voice and that tone she adopted when she was playing Disciplinarian Mummy. _"If you don't like it, don't let peoples see it. Use a hankie and put it in the gah-bage."_

The backs of Terra's eyeballs stung. She opened her eyes wider, forcing them to dry out.

"Terra?" Beast Boy's voice floated up to her.

"Yeah," she said hastily. "Man, it's dusty in here." She scrubbed at her eyes so that if they were red she could blame that.

She'd tried so long, so hard not to remember anything like that. Memory was a snare, a silver wire around your neck. You could look back, but if you remembered something that actually meant something, you were sunk. Green tress, warm bread, the throb of a scraped knee – pretties, but ultimately meaningless. You could think of them without too much bother.

But other things… think of _them_ and you got trapped in the past, because the past was so much better than the present. Each day was worse than the one that came before it. Once you got trapped in the past, you saw yourself as you really were, all the brattiness and tantrums and obstinacy. You knew you were in trouble when even _that_ was shiner than the here and now.

"Terra?" Cyborg brought her close to his angular, red and yellow face. His range of facial expressions was severely limited by that face, but there was still concern in his voice. Her head jerked forward because his movements weren't anything like smooth yet. "Girl, you in there?"

"Yeah. Um, Cy? Could you put me down, please? I'm kinda hungry."

* * *

"So that's it." Speedy leaned back in his chair with an audible sigh. It was hard plastic and grey – the kind of thing they might have used in a classroom somewhere in another world. "He wants in."

Terra noted how he, Starfire and Raven had set themselves up opposite herself, Beast Boy and Cyborg. What, did they expect them to cross their room to show their allegiance? Cy refused to move in case he missed a step and squashed them all, so that option was out. And quite frankly, she was too tired to move anywhere unless the words 'second' and 'apocalypse' featured heavily.

"He'd give us full range of the complex, including the supply stores."

"Would he let us bring people down here?" That from Cyborg, though to look at his impassivity you wouldn't know he'd spoken. His expressive transistors had gone offline again, and behind his eyes a million tiny electrical impulses worked to get them back under his control.

There were similarities to his old systems, but there was no getting away from the fact that now he was now a personality programme in an all-robot body. Terra wondered whether all his personality had been stored in the computerized part of his brain, or whether they'd just got the selected bits – a hollow echo of the Cyborg they'd known. The very idea made her shiver, and she pushed it away.

"What?" said Speedy.

"People. Survivors. Would he let us bring them down here with us?"

"I don't know. Maybe. You'd have to ask him." He made a face that said he'd thought of that before but was glad someone else had brought it up. "So what do we think?"

Beast Boy mused on it. "Mechanic becomes a Titan, and in exchange we move out of the caves and into this place."

"And he'd keep an eye on how Cyborg's adjusting to his new body. You know, to make sure there aren't any problems with it."

"Or to shut him down and call it a malfunction when we're not looking," Raven added.

Terra glanced at her. She was doing the cape thing again, hiding all but a few shades of her face. Her eyes were closed, her head bowed, but it was obvious she was listening intently to the conversation. Tension rode shotgun in her shoulders.

"Is he that untrustworthy?" Beast Boy asked. He hadn't been there when they first encountered Mechanic, and so knew only part of the story.

"Trustworthiness is as constancy – inconstant."

He scratched his head. "I hate when you do that."

"Raven's just being Raven," said Terra, curling her arms around her knees and rocking thoughtfully. "I think it sounds like a sweet deal. The caves don't have any automatic defences. This place does. In the caves we've all but run out of food, and when we don't catch anything, we starve. Here there's a ready-made store until we can figure out a better solution in the long run. Cyborg can keep his new bod in shape, we might be able to get a good night's sleep for once, and if we can get some survivors down here to safety... well, so much the better."

Beast Boy whistled. "Look at you being all forward-thinking."

"Had to happen sometime."

Raven opened her eyes. "You're forgetting the crucial element of all this. We know precious little about Mechanic, save he may have worked for the government at some point and his sanity is tenuous – at best."

"Maybe he's the best off of everyone," Terra snorted.

"I'll choose to believe I didn't hear that."

"You do that."

"What does Mechanic get out of all this?" Cyborg interrupted. It was a good question.

"Mechanic articulated his wish to maintain the body of his, uh, 'boss' and retain close proximity to it," Starfire said in clipped tones. She stood with her hands behind her back, and her gaze would periodically slip out of focus, as if she were thinking of another topic entirely. It was disconcerting, but better than those moments she looked caught between crying tears that never came and punching something.

"You've got to wonder about a guy with that much attachment to a big metal statue." Beast Boy ran a hand through his hair.

"Different floats for different boats," Terra supplied. "Maybe he just wants some company. Or maybe giving us a pad to crash in is his form of protection money."

"So we'd be, like, his bodyguards?"

"Less the black suits and earpieces, BB. But yeah, maybe that's what he's after. He's - " she refrained from adding 'just' " - a regular human. Easy pickings for Misshapens whenever he goes out. And we've already seen that he _does_ go out. For salvaging junk and stuff."

"It could be any number of things," said Cyborg. "It could be everything we just said, or it could be something completely different."

"He could be affiliated with the… you-know-whats." Beast Boy shrugged. "What? I'm trying to be a… what's that saying? Satan's lawyer? That crappy movie with Keanu Reeves in it."

"Devil's advocate," Speedy corrected. "And yes, that movie sucked big time."

"That's the one. Raven said he worked for the government."

"I said he _might_ have worked for the government. It's likely, given his extensive knowledge of A.I. and his access to this place."

"Or he could have come from an independent faction, like the Lone Gunmen, and just happened to find this place by accident," said Terra. "Or he could be an undercover mutant cow come to make us all drink milk until we explode."

Raven slitted one eye at her. "While I appreciate that humour is an effective defensive mechanism, Terra, it hardly seems appropriate right now."

"No, I think it really _is_ appropriate right now." Terra placed both palms flat against the floor and stared hard at everyone in turn. "We're debating his motives like he's some sort of criminal, and yet we've been here over twenty-four hours and I've yet to see him make anything _like_ a hostile move against us. Yes, he could be out to get us. Yes, he could be totally innocent and just want a good conversation. The point is, so far the positive arguments outweigh the negative, so why don't we take up his offer for a trial period and see how it goes from there? Alternatively, Raven could do one of those freaky-deaky mind-scans to see if he's on the level."

Raven's cloak tightened. "Scanning an unbalanced mind isn't always accurate."

"There you go, then. We don't have any way of knowing until we try it. So I put my hand up and vote we make him a Titan – at least for a while."

"Sort of like a probationary member?" Beast Boy nodded and raised his hand. "I can go for that."

"You're sure you're not just agreeing with her because she's your _squeeze_?" Raven muttered, and it was impossible but it seemed like there was a bitter thread in her voice. Both Terra and Beast Boy blushed, and Terra peered at her, but she was still busy being Raven – cold and hard and finicky.

Everyone chose to ignore that remark. Cyborg agreed with the idea of a pilot membership, and Starfire had zoned out enough that she also mumbled her agreement. Which left Raven and Speedy. Or, since Raven had already made her position abundantly clear, Speedy was left to cast his vote.

He grunted and sank back in his chair. "Considering the total lack of privileges being leader has afforded me so far, can't I claim this as one of them and just abstain?"

"Considering you _are_ leader, you have to vote," Raven informed him flatly.

"Right. Just checking. In which case, I say we go for the probationary idea." He looked back at her.

"I'm not going to make this neat and tidy and unanimous just because it'd be easier for you. I stand by what I said."

"That you don't trust him," Speedy sighed, but she shook her head.

"I neither trust nor distrust him. I just wish it to be known that I'm opposed to this willy-nilly handing out of membership cards on principle."

Terra frowned. "So… you're saying it wouldn't matter who'd asked to join, you'd oppose them being made a Titan just because?" Then she rolled her eyes and resisted the urge to scream. "You could be quite possibly the most infuriating person I've ever met."

"Bearing in mind I've just been overruled, you'll have to forgive me if I don't weep tears of sorrow over that." A small puddle of darkness appeared beneath Raven's feet, and she sank into it while still speaking. "I'll go and inform Mechanic of his upgraded status."

Terra suspected she was going to threaten him with spectacular mental tortures if he betrayed their trust, too, but didn't comment on it. Still, the notion dispelled her desire to scream. A little. It maybe even made her feel a little more kindly disposed towards Raven. She may not be the most agreeable person on their sad and scarred little planet, but she stood by her teammates. If they fell flat on their faces, she'd be a bit quiet, but she wouldn't even think of saying 'I told you so'. It had taken Terra a while to figure that out, and to understand even a tiny portion of why Raven stayed to fight their battles with them.

If, as seemed probable given her sporadic father and deceased mother, part of Terra's fixation with superheroing in a battered wasteland was that it gave her a quick way to fill a previously empty cart at the Family Supermarket, then it was perhaps understandable why she was more willing than Raven to give Mechanic a chance, and why she was less discerning when it came to making bonds and forming relationships with those around her. Any kind of relationship was satisfactory – from what she had with Beast Boy, to the respect she had for Speedy, to the irritation byway between her and Raven. Terra just threw in everything she saw, everything available to her. And these fractured remnants of a more golden age were definitely in her field of vision, so she grabbed and held on tight to stop herself from skidding on every spill in the aisles.

And at times like this, when Mechanic burst through the door with nothing short of rapture on his face, and hugged the stuffing out of anyone who would let him… well, it seemed almost worthwhile.

* * *

They moved their stuff in all at once. Maybe it would have been a better idea to do things piecemeal, just in case it _was_ a set-up, but with Misshapens sniffing around and precious few mementoes stashed away, they wanted to protect what they had. Mechanic set them up with separate bedrooms, and while the tiny grey boxes with bunks moulded into the walls were hardly the Ritz, they had actual _doors _and thin sheets and were inside a building protected by _lasers_.

Terra unpacked within fifteen minutes, spent another fifteen staring and pacing, rearranged everything, and then went to look for the others.

The rooms were all along the same corridor, but it was Mechanic she met first. He was carrying a small box of weird looking tools under his arm and beamed at her when she appeared.

"Hey, hey, hey," he said, and she could almost overlook the vestiges of grief in his eyes. He still mourned for his 'boss', and so channelled that grief into caring for the new owner of his body. Cyborg had been through three separate checks within an hour before Mechanic was satisfied enough to let him see his new room – a much bigger space they were going to drag stuff into to make it more comfortable and less like a hangar. "What's shakin', toots?"

Terra giggled. _This whole place, if I wanted it to,_ she thought, but didn't say it. Mechanic looked puzzled, but kept smiling.

"How's Cyborg?"

He patted his tools, underscoring she was correct in her thinking. "New Boss is right as rain. Shiny as a new button. Yup-yup. Had to give his operating systems a tweak, but at least now he can use his thumbs. Sure enough."

"And you?"

The smile was not enough to cover the moment of shock that someone would ask him that. "No complaints, no complaints. Nice to have folks around the place. Would say 'again', but there ain't never been nobody here but me. Nu-uh. Me an' the boss. The boss an' me. Peas in a pod, y'know? Pretty crowded pod now, but that's good, right? Peas is meant to be crammed full. Makes 'em taste better. Makes 'em greener. You like your greens? Make you grow big an' strong."

"I thought that was milk."

"Nu-uh, milk's for bones. Calcium. Beats osteoporosis. Protein builds up muscles. Vitamins come in little pots with numbers on 'em. Alpha, beta, come-an'-get'a. Greens is good for your health. Hale an' hearty, geddit? Good greens. Greens is good."

There was solid information in the babbling. Whatever his mental state now, Mechanic had clearly been an intelligent man before. Shards of it peeped under the edges. "Yes," Terra said, nodding and feeling a little like a 'Jane and John' book. "Greens are good."

"Smart girl."

The door next to them swung open. "Hey," said Beast Boy. "The Green Guy is in da house. What's up, dude and dudette?"

His expression when they burst into peels of laughter was priceless.

* * *

_To Be Continued …_

* * *


	9. Shadows of Fire

* * *

**9: Shadows of Fire**

* * *

"No!"

Too hot, too hot, the flames and fire and hot hot hot, and ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and doesn't really matter and hot fire hot hot burning burning away all the screaming and calling and I can't help you I want to I want to so much but I can't and the hot fire hot fiery fire that burns burns burns and hurts and burns and –

"Terra! Terra, wake _up_!"

Terra came to with a start. Her hair was limp and matted to her head with the same sweat that slicked the sheet to her body like a second skin. For several seconds she lay rigid with terror while her brain struggled to figure out who and where she was. When, after another second or two, her memory returned, she levered herself upright and realised there were hands leaving her shoulders and the weight of another body on her bed.

Her bed. This place. This room in this complex in this desert city of lost and forgotten souls.

Beast Boy's eyes were huge in the gloom. The door was open, and the strip-lighting from the corridor cast an eerie blue-white glow that stretched a few feet into the room. "You were having a nightmare. I heard you right through the wall."

They all had nightmares. All of them. All the time. It was as much a part of their lives as breathing, but usually they could beat off the worst with pure exhaustion. That kind of sleep was dreamless.

But this dream …

This place …

There were no windows in their new rooms. Air ducts, but no windows. The enclosed space had become warm, the hot air hard to breathe. Terra's throat felt dry and scorched, her head swollen with heat. Her whole body ran with sweat, even though she'd stripped to get clean – water to wash! And soap! Soap and water for washing and scrubbing and rinsing and lather and bubbles and never clean never never never – and the only thing between her and indecency was a thin percale sheet pinned under her arms. She made washing motions with her hands, and the calluses felt _seared._

She started to cry. She tried to force the tears back down, but something about the room, the dark, the dream and the way Beast Boy was just _staring_ at her with those stupid expressive eyes made it impossible. A large bulb of water dripped off the end of her nose. Another seeped into the crease at the side of her mouth. And then she was sobbing, and it hurt her already parched throat, and she was maybe losing her grip but she didn't freaking _care_ anymore.

"They could have been safe here. They could've … I could've kept them … safe …"

Beast Boy got up.

No, he moved over, came closer and reached out, but didn't quite touch her for a long and awkward moment. His fingers flexed, hesitant, and then he closed a hand over her shoulder. His touch was feather-light, like he was frightened she might break, but when she fell forward he caught her and was just as strong as she needed him to be. She didn't see his expression over her shoulder.

She was aware that, in a normal world, the fact that she was pretty much naked and pressed against him, and he was a teenage boy whose hormones hadn't been killed off when the world was, would probably have led to a very different conclusion.

But this wasn't a normal world, and she could open and shut doors in her head all she wanted because that one fact sucked all the eroticism out of … everything.

"They were all burnt up," she said, muffled against his costume – of course he hadn't got changed, of course, of course, of course. "They couldn't be moved because we had nowhere to put them. Just the Observatory. And this place was sitting here all along with nobody in it. And … oh shit, oh fuck, oh Goh-hoh-hod …" The word gained syllables as a spasm gripped her chest and she sobbed.

"You didn't know," Beast Boy whispered, only he wasn't being Beast Boy now, he was being Garfield. He was wearing another mask; the one he wore when they were alone and nobody could stop them from being who they were, saying what they wanted, doing what they had to do just to stay sane. "Nobody knew."

Terra was aware that these words should have made her feel better. Except that they didn't, and it was ridiculous, because he was right, they hadn't known, but there it was.

"All burnt up. All burnt up, with no place to go…"

* * *

Mechanic's stores didn't have alcohol, but they did have coffee. It was the freeze-dried stuff, and though there was powdered milk Terra drank it black. Her military-issue beaker was filled with something the colour and consistency of molasses, but when she put it to her lips her veins started singing.

She was so enjoying it that she didn't notice anyone else enter the room. So when the itchiness of a gaze blossomed between her shoulder blades she almost did a spit-take, like some character in those old anime shows she used to like watching.

Raven's hood was down.

"Um …" Terra wiped at her mouth with the back of one hand, wishing she'd gone back to her room to drink this stuff. "You want some?" She offered the beaker across, but Raven shook her head.

"I think it would be too much to hope for herbal tea in there." It sounded like a statement, but with Raven you could never be sure.

"I don't think so. But I think maybe I saw some sachets of powdered Earl Grey towards the back."

She raised an eyebrow. It was an involuntary movement, and all the more genuine because of it. "Have you ever tried Earl Grey?"

"Uh, no?"

"Don't."

"Is that your piece of early morning wisdom?"

"No." She turned to leave, stopped, turned back and narrowed her eyes at Terra. "Wisdom. Accumulated knowledge. The ability to use experience in order to make sensible decisions or judgments."

Terra blinked, nonplussed, and slid her eyes from side to side. "Ohhh-kay. So we've established the dictionary definition of wisdom."

Raven's gaze was probing, or perhaps reflective. It wasn't quite a brick wall, but Terra still felt like she was pounding her head against it.

"You sure you don't want some coffee?"

Instead of saying 'no', or shaking her head like a normal person, Raven said quietly, "Not sleeping won't make it go away. It never does." She slipped from the room through the gap where the door met the ceiling.

Terra looked down at her beaker. Then, a little defiantly perhaps, she downed the rest in one long gulp.

* * *

"But I can help!"

Terra gritted her teeth and ran a hand through her hair. "You _are _helping. By staying here."

Mechanic wrung his hands and glanced around like he expected Raven to fade in with more of her scary shadowy shit. He was excessively nervous around her, making Terra wonder just what had happened in their little 'admissions chat'.

"But I'm quick. An' I can punch. Uh-huh."

_You can also die. Much easier than we can._ The thought popped into her head before she could stop it. "Speedy'd say the same thing," she said, not at all certain he would. Why had Mechanic come to her instead of him with his request to join in patrolling, anyway? "It's better for all concerned if you stay here. Cyborg's almost up to scratch, but if he wants to make a test run anytime soon then he's got to be _better_ than that. Which is where you come in."

Mechanic looked down at his hands and uncurled his fists, as if the answer he wanted to hear was in joint and tendon and knuckle. "I'm s'posed to be a Titan," he said, subdued. "Y'all said so. I thought that was what Titans did."

"Not all Titans."

"But I can - "

"Just because you can doesn't mean you have to."

He went very quiet. Then he turned his thousand-gigawatt smile on her. "Best - best get going, girlie-girl."

She smiled in that brightly forced way that wasn't really all that cheerful. "Girlie-girl? Who're you calling girly? Come here, buster, so I can stab you with my Malibu Barbie."

* * *

There were times when she could clear her mind and times when she couldn't.

Three nights ago, when she had the nightmare and Beast Boy – _Garfield _… that was a time she couldn't.

But right now? Right now she could quite easily zone out and think of nothing but the warmth and comfort of having someone use her belly as a pillow.

She was slumped against a wall, fresh from a minor scuffle with Speedy in which she'd proven that, yes, his hand-to-hand was indeed getting better, but no, he still couldn't beat her. Although it had been close. And it didn't irk her in that childishly competitive way it should've, because yesterday they'd rescued a couple of kids and brought them down here. Patti and Alice were the first rescues where Terra hadn't felt the bite of guilt at leaving the scene without them, and it felt even better than a peaceful night's sleep.

So here they were – she and Speedy and Beast Boy, the not-quite-newbie and leader and veteran of team dynamics. BB had cheered them both on from the sidelines, caught between rooting for the object of his affections and not pissing off his leader. In the end he'd plumped for nameless cries and whistles, then gone crazy when Terra pinned Speedy on his back and held him there with a knee to the throat.

"I win."

_We all win,_ she corrected now, idly making little circles in the hair on BB's temple. He shivered, tickling her tummy, then shifted when her giggles bounced his head.

"Aw, man. I was comfy."

"Well this piece of furniture has pins and needles in her legs." Terra blinked. "Hey – is he asleep?"

Beast Boy looked at where Speedy was also slumped, fingers laced over his abdomen and head tilted down. He had his mask on, as always – "Why do we need secret identities again?" – so it was impossible to see if his eyes were closed or not.

"I dunno. Lucky guy if he is." He nestled against her. "But I bet I'm luckier."

"You're going to make me blush."

"Cool."

"Not cool. I'm all sweaty and yuk. Blushing will make it worse."

"Very technical there, dudette."

She smiled and gently thwapped his head. "I'm too comfortable to punish you for that remark, but believe me, punishment _will _be delivered." She yawned. "At some point."

"Yum. I'll look forward to it."

She thwapped him again. "Perv."

They lay in silence for a few minutes.

The metal wall was sticky against her back, and she could no longer feel her feet, but the alternative was getting Beast Boy to move. Speedy still hadn't said a word, so she concluded that he was indeed asleep. He looked very peaceful like that, like some kid who'd wandered out of a Halloween party and gone to sleep on the porch. Thinking about him like that, the mask was easier to take.

Cyborg was almost ready to try going outside. He'd been a little cautious about the whole thing, claiming worry he might lose control of his systems at some crucial moment and jeopardise them all. Now, however, he was getting on for almost a week without mishap. Terra had even caught him whistling this morning while Mechanic took a peep behind his chestplate to make sure everything was a-go-go.

Mechanic hadn't asked again about going on patrol. Speedy hadn't mentioned it either; leaving Terra to think that she'd been the only one he'd asked. It was flattering in some ways, disconcerting in others, because she wasn't leader and until then she hadn't thought she had any special connection with Mechanic. At least, nothing beyond what the others had with him – except Raven, of course.

Mechanic avoided Raven where he could, which was understandable, Terra guessed. The expression Raven wore when she saw him was no different, but the air around her seemed to drip ice. It froze anyone within a thirty feet radius and left prickles up and down their skin.

Raven the ice-queen. Raven the watching shadow. Raven the enigma. Raven the impenetrable. Raven was Teflon-coated and camouflaged. Terra kind of understood the others, but whenever she tried to look inside Raven she found her eyes drawn away, her questions repelled with stones and black-tipped arrows. Her curiosity seemed to slip and slide, leaving no trace – whenever they next spoke Raven gave no indication she remembered or cared about any previous conversations.

Terra sometimes wondered if Raven was hiding something. Or maybe she was just plain arrogant. Was she supremely confident or supremely insecure?

Terra didn't know.

She used to think she was getting to know her, but that was just fantasy. Raven was subtler than she was; she couldn't outwit her and reduce her down to a few neat labels. Every time she thought she had a handle on what made that girl tick, Raven would do something new or unexpected and turn the whole equation on its tail. It was like she was toying with them all, creating one image of herself but adding layers underneath, layers upon layers upon layers that were thorny and complex and so full of convolutions that to try and make sense of them was like emptying the sea with an eggcup.

Terra shook her head. No, not thinking about that now. Raven had this tendency to knot up her thoughts, and she didn't want knotty thoughts. Not now. Not when she felt so good. She wanted this feeling to last and last.

Speedy let out a tiny snore.

"Lucky bastard," BB whispered without opening his eyes.

Terra just smiled and ran her fingers across spot where his missing ear-tip should have been.

* * *

_To Be Continued ..._

* * *


	10. Starfire

* * *

**10: Starfire**

* * *

Starfire was attempting to rebandage Patti's injured arm. Patti was five years old and tiny, with hair like black silk and a rosette mouth. She looked like a collector's doll, a total antithesis to three-year-old Alice's blonde curls and tanned skin. It was easy to imagine Alice at the park, or running around the yard playing kickball. Patti was bookish and smelled vaguely of lemons once she'd been washed. Terra was reminded of the library at her old school, where they used citrus-based cleaning solution to mop the floors.

School was okay to remember, but small things like the lemon smell were better. You could take that out of context and not worry about being sucked in.

She moved forward and gently pried Starfire's fingers away. "Here," she said softly, part of her not wanting to startle Star from whatever daydream she'd fallen into. Probably something involving green tights, masks and a boy who didn't bite worse than he barked. "Let me."

Starfire blinked. For a second the hard lines on her face smoothed out, and she was the old Star again – the one who had to be dissuaded that dirt was a good alternative to rabbit, and who thought nothing of hugging Raven enough to inflate her head with fury. "I … what?"

"Nothing."

Carefully, Terra unwrapped the too-tight bandages and bound them again. Patti stared up at her with a thumb in her mouth, then clambered forward and thrust both arms out for a hug. Terra obliged, suffused with something like contentment as she inhaled lemons and warmth and little-girl-scent. Were there such things as comfort-smells? She liked to think so.

Starfire sat on her heels, bunching and unbunching her fists on her thighs. Alice was asleep in the corner, sprawled across two spare pillows and covered in a percale sheet identical to those on their own beds.

Terra reached out and laid a hand on Star's shoulder. "You okay?"

"I…" she started, and then turned in on herself. Her face slammed shut. "I am fine. I am simply unused to human infants."

Patti removed the thumb from her mouth. "Pretty," she announced, and made a grab for Terra's hair.

"Ah," Terra replied, catching her wrist. "A hair-puller, are you?"

Patti stared back at her with eyes that had probably seen too much. But she was five years old and hopefully couldn't understand a lot of it, which was the only consolation anybody could draw. The words 'formative years' were studiously avoided.

"Pretty," she said again. "Want it."

At that moment, Alice decided to wake up. She rubbed at her eyes and gazed around with the look of one startled from a good dream. Terra had almost forgotten what that felt like.

"Hey there, sunshine."

Alice looked back at her blankly. She had yet to say a word to anyone, whether because she was too shy, or because she'd had her words shocked right out of her. Speedy had found her in the middle of a battle zone, cowering under an upturned cardboard box. There had been two bodies nearby – one man and one woman, both blonde and both killed by Misshapens. It didn't seem too farfetched to think they were her parents. Only the little bracelet on her wrist had told them her name: Alice Harman.

"You hungry?" Terra tried.

Alice said nothing.

"She's always hungry," said Patti. "Why d'ya always ask?"

"Because one day she might answer."

Patti snorted, showing what she thought of _that_ idea. "She's stupid," she declared, putting paid to any ideas about the two children being friends for each other. "I'm hungry, too."

"Well, BB should be here, soon."

Patti's face lit up. "Salad Head!"

As if on cue, the door to the 'crèche' opened and in walked an armful of food sachets. Beast Boy followed, heralding the room with a, "Howdy-hey-hey, small people." His face was obscured, but his grin _filled_ the room.

"Salad Head! Salad Head!" Patti squealed, wrenching from Terra's arms and jumping up and down. "Do the monkey! Do the monkey!"

Beast Boy dumped the sachets in an available spot and was nearly bowled over when she slammed into his legs. "Wow, what a welcome." He returned the hug as best he could. "Hey there, kiddo."

"Do the monkey!"

"Why does everyone always want the monkey?" But he complied, 'ook-ook-ahh-ahh'ing Patti into paroxysms of giggles. The sound of a child's laughter was like a light Summer breeze, and even Starfire wavered against it.

Alice looked vaguely intrigued, crawling forward to brace her hands on the edge of the pillows and watch.

Terra smiled. Beast Boy was one of those weirdoes children took an instant liking to, and could usually tease a smile from Alice when she was in the mood.

Patti clapped her hands and bounced her head and looked thoroughly disappointed when he resumed human form – at least until he brought over a small bar of something calling itself 'banana-beef'.

"Who came up with these flavours?" he wondered aloud, as she tucked in. Within seconds, the vast majority of it was on her cheeks, forehead, chin, and some had even climbed into her hair. "Man, kiddo. You make me look _tidy_."

"You're cool, Salaff Heff," Patti replied, and cuddled his arm.

"Looks like I have competition." Terra went to tempt Alice with a bar of 'strawberry-sashimi'.

"If she proposes to me first, I'm taking it. Unless you can come up with a better ring. I'm thinking something gold, maybe 24-carat, with the nickname 'knuckleduster'."

"I'll give you knuckleduster, Salad Head." She paused. "Man, that made so much more sense in my head."

"You're stupid," Patti stated, and went back to her bar.

"Out of the mouths of babes…"

"Cheeky little beggar," Terra muttered, pulling Alice gently into her lap and breaking off a small piece of pinkish tablet. She placed it carefully into her mouth, pleased to note that she opened and accepted it willingly this time. At first she'd shown no interest in food. They'd had to almost pry her lips apart before she passed out. "_Good _girl."

"Human younglings are very … similar to Tamaranean," Starfire said haltingly. "And yet they are so very different."

"Would you like to feed her?" Terra offered, wondering how long she'd be able to say that without worrying about Star zoning out and accidentally crushing one of them.

Star bit her lip, honestly torn. Then she got to her feet and the barrier that snarled and wore a tattered red tunic was back. The naked emotion in her eyes was heartbreaking. "I will visit Cyborg and Mechanic before I embark upon patrol. Excuse me."

She left.

"Hey!" Beast Boy fended off Patti, as she attempted to grind banana-beef into his scalp. "Gerroff! Terra, help! I'm being assaulted by partially hydrogenated food products."

Terra sniggered and avoided thoughts about what a good father he'd make in another world.

* * *

"I know that your powers of retention are as wet as a warthog's backside; but thick as you are, pay attention. My words are a matter of pride. It's clear from your vacant expressions; the lights are not all on upstairs. But we're talking … um … we're talking …"

"Whatcha doin'?"

"Gah!" Terra jumped nearly three feet in the air and turned on the balls of her feet. Her hands lowered when she saw who was behind her. "Mechanic. Don't sneak up on a girl like that."

He gave her one of those rueful grins that crinkled his eyes. When she bent to pick up her notebook, he peered at it. "S'pretty. Diary?" There was something hungry about the way he asked.

Terra shook her head. "No." She tried to ignore the way his face fell – not a lot, but a vague shift in expression that didn't sit right, like he _wanted_ her to be venting herself on paper. The reasons for that were too numerous, too convoluted, and too suspicious to think about. So she didn't. Instead she held the book up, like a school kid showing a proud parent the gold star on a test. "I'm trying to remember song lyrics."

"Oh. What to?" He didn't ask why.

"Movies. Disney stuff." She flipped through the scrawly pages. There was no need to hide them; it wasn't like she was keeping anything personal in there. "You know any Disney songs?"

"When you wish upon a star, makes no dif'rence who you are," Mechanic warbled tunelessly. "Anything your heart desires will come … to … you." His grin showed shockingly crooked teeth, canted at odd angles like buildings after an earthquake. There were bits of green stuck between them, too, giving the impression of uprooted shrubbery. His mouth was a study in dental devastation.

Still, Terra smiled back. "Jiminy Cricket. Louis Armstrong. Cool."

"The Boss was never too fond of ol' Louis. Nope. Said he squeaked too much. But I was partial to a bit of the ol' trumpet. Yes I was. Nameen?" He made motions of what she assumed was playing a trumpet. Or maybe choking a small animal.

The notepaper crackled in her fingers. She'd always wondered that paper could sound so different when you'd written on it. A new notebook made swishy noises, and you had to lick your fingers to separate the pages. A used notebook felt like dead skin, all hard and puckered, as if by writing on it you'd removed the potential contained within it. Without that potential, it was just so much dead wood.

She frowned. _Jeez. Overthink, much?_

The notebook snapped shut.

Mechanic's stance was hesitant. The alcove she'd chosen wasn't too far from the crèche, but far enough not to feel like she was spying on Raven and Speedy while they watched the kids. Speedy was no problem, but she barely knew if she trusted Raven around metahumans. Defenceless babies …

"You goin' someplace?" Again, that hungry note crept into Mechanic's voice. It wasn't prominent, but it was there.

Terra thought that should disturb her more than it did. Mechanic was a lonely man, but lonely men were still men. There were times she could almost forget that, times she could lose herself in his friendliness and honesty – but then she'd catch him watching one of them, eyes not just looking but looking _into_ them. He could bore holes in you when he got that stare. It reminded her of rogue wolves, cut out of their packs but still circling around the edges, not taking the hint until the alpha male bared his teeth and spiked his hackles.

And yet she liked him. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe she should have just pushed him away and refused to deal with his crap, but she couldn't. They were in this together – all of them. And besides, there was hope for him now. Sometimes he had flashes of sparkling lucidity, devoid of the stop-start discourse markers that otherwise peppered his speech. The more he was exposed to company, to kindness, the better he got. There was something visible to the improvements in him. However selfish it was, Terra needed to see that. She needed confirmation things – people – could get better.

On the cover of her notebook was an intricate knot of blue biro, doodled on more than one occasion. It covered most of the card, twisting this way and that, ducking in and out of its own loops and circling around like a snake eating its own tail. It was complex and, though she hadn't intended it, rather pretty.

"Wow." Mechanic whistled. "You do that?"

"Hm? This thing? Yeah. Why, you want one?"

His eyes were round and perhaps a little overbright. "Could I?"

"Sure. I'll drop it off with you sometime. But for now, I need to find BB and get the 411 on his patrol."

She almost didn't see the slump of lustre in Mechanic's eyes.

Almost.

* * *

She held the young man's face tenderly in her hands, feeling the roughness of his afternoon stubble, the slight rubbery quality of his cheeks. She wondered how he'd got away with only stubble instead of a full beard. Shaving equipment wasn't exactly easy to come by, or keep hold of. Razors could be traded for lots of food.

Terra put the face back down on the street where she'd found it, and silently vowed to destroy whatever creature had torn it from some unsuspecting victim. There was no body nearby, nothing else to bury. It took less than ten minutes after finding a suitable patch of dirt.

"Find anything?" Cyborg stepped carefully around the side of a building. His feet sounded like the stilts she'd made out of tin cans when she was eight.

"You could say that," she said quietly. Then, louder, "You?"

"Nada."

"Slim pickings around this area. It's too close to where city hall used to be. Think we should go find BB and Star?"

"Well, Raven ain't been in contact yet, so we're supposed to return to base." Cyborg's trips outside were still short. Mostly it was self-imposed. He ventured into sunlight like it would burn him, and all but epitomised the phrase 'gentle giant'. Terra was glad they hadn't been in any fights, yet. She didn't know how he'd cope.

"Can't we …?"

"Terra, I'd rather … I need to get back."

She bit her lip. "You sure?" If he was having problems with his operating systems he would have said so. She didn't want to push him, but …

There was no hesitation. "I'm sure."

"Right. Right, okay. We'll head back."

"Thanks." He didn't need to say it. She would have preferred he didn't say it. But he'd said it, and it forced her to smile unconvincingly and wave her hand like she didn't mind going back empty-handed.

"No biggie."

Big biggie.

Very big.

* * *

_To Be Continued ..._

* * *


End file.
